Announcing the Practical website!
by Matt May
Yeah, okay. You know what this is.
It’s occurred to me that I’ve been in business (for some value of “business”) since late last year, but still never got around to building a website. I’ll admit, part of it was that I’ve been getting by without one, but I’ve also been running myself in circles trying to find a set of tools that would let me build a good one, without a lot of setup and maintenance, and still manages to show I practice what I preach. The longer it went, the further away I got from building a great first site.
So today I did the next best thing: I launched an awful one, in every sense. For April Fools’ Day, I built a homepage that posed Practical as a bog-standard accessibility consultancy, pitching compliance culture, return on investment, made-up certifications and a bunch of other stuff that I’d never sell. (I built it using Google Sites, which it turns out I don’t actively hate, though it’s too basic for me to use for a real site.)
For today, practeq.com links to it directly. I’ll leave you some time to read through it. Maybe somebody out there will get the message. But if not, at least it was cathartic. Feel free to recommend “Practical” to people you want to teach a lesson.
Yesterday was Easter, so here’s your Easter egg: that stock photo, titled "Young beautiful hispanic woman business worker smiling confident sitting on wheelchair at office,” is from Kraken Images (and also available on Shutterstock and Adobe Stock).
The model’s name is Andria. Here she is doing yoga!
Oh, and that chair she’s sitting in? It’s a children’s wheelchair made by Ziggo. Weirdly, a lot of Kraken models use the same wheelchair. Must have been some sale! Anyway, I licensed these in case someday I want to do a talk about stock photography, misrepresentation, and the abled gaze. But I do have to let you all check out this gen-AI beauty. Anything to avoid paying disabled models, I guess.
The site will be live for the rest of today. I’ll remove the redirect from Practical’s domain on Tuesday, but I’ll keep the page where it is for link integrity. Hope you enjoyed it, or at least got angry in the way I expected you would. 😁
Practical Trips and office hours
I’ll be in Montreal in late May for the Accessible Canada, Accessible World conference. (How can you not want to go to a conference that has designated provocateurs?) I’ve also got something going in Washington, DC at the end of the month. Want to meet up? Let me know.
Office hours are now open for this week. They’re all 30 minutes long, and free.
Book a free office hours session this Thursday
Have a great week.