Last week, I discovered this WCAG 2 AAA Web accessibility guidelines. I understand that this is the direction that everyone should aspire to and organisations with serious resources, specially governments (without an exception) should meet. But for me, this discovery was through a requirement in a contract at work. And to give you a hint of how unreachable it is for a small org with limited resources, here are few selected points from it,

• SC 1.4.1: The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 7:1.

• SC 3.1.6: There should be extra mechanisms (tooltips etc) to explain when a word may mean more than one thing. e.g, ‘desert’

• SC 2.2.5: When an authenticated session expires, the user can continue the activity without loss of data after re-authenticating. (half filled forms are maintained)

Now all of this is doable from scratch for a right sized team, and they are good things no doubt. My contention is with projects randomly enforcing a guideline just as a requirement among a list of others.

For some time now, I have pondered which type of writing should I put at the start of this newsletter. There are often specific topics that I would like to go in depth in, but they are either not well suited to the format here, i.e, they are political, too personal, etc, or too niche if it is technical.

I still do the technical ones from time to time, and share personal thoughts as well. But now that the writing bug has caught me again through this newsletter, I have decided to add a new section for these writings on my website alongside the short stories and this newsletter.

I don’t have it yet, but I’ll do that today and link the ones I want to share with you here.

Book I want to read

Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka | Goodreads

In the tradition of Long Bright River and The Mars Room…

I received this interesting recommendation from one of my colleagues. The book sees the life of a serial killer from the perspective of women in his life.

Interesting reads

1. MIT class project turns into an FDA cleared cure for Tremors

2. The world’s largest eagle hunted unlike any other bird of prey

3. Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them
   I don’t necessarily fully endorse this take, it is definitely a very interesting article. It is a long one. If you are interested, maybe check this out too. It isn’t a proper counter to everything in the original article, in my opinion, but it is short at least.

A project I discovered

One MCP for reverse engineering across binaries, applications, and runtime behavior.

GitHub - morluto/rea: Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries. · GitHub

Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries. - morluto/rea

You might have already seen this one. It was all the rage last week, where I too discovered it. Definitely very useful if you like experimenting and going into random rabbit holes.

A photo I took

Quick question. Would you like me to include book blurbs in the book recommendation section? Do let me know. Thanks and see you next week! 👋🏽