October 2022
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Mandated by law under certain circumstances, but always good practice and a sign of inclusive thinking, accessibility statements (and placing them in a navigation scheme) may sometimes be considered merely a compliance chore rather than a subject of good design themselves. In an article on the Deque blog, Patrick Sturdivant highlights a personal perspective on how important a part of UX such statement can be.
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My Grandma is Not a Cyborg
futuress.org 
The story of early fighter planes designed for an idealized body type leading to about 90% of accidents due to operational issues is well known to anybody who ever attended a university class in usability, ergonomics, or “human factors”. Sinem Görücü tells a similar tale through her […]
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Punkt. MP02 Pigeon
punkt.ch 
The Punkt MP02 is marketed as a “voicephone” – a 4G mobile device that is stripped down to the very bare functionalities of voice, text and serving as a hotspot for a tablet or PC. It’s not just a cool example of a very minimalist product for people mindful of their relation to […]
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Privacy Pledge
privacy-pledge.com 
Meet the Privacy Pledge – a simple list of five key principles, designed as a commitment by those signing it:
We, the undersigned, commit ourselves to rebuilding the internet so that it returns to the ideals set out by its founders: a democratic platform designed to facilitate the […]
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Joschi Kuphal: #Unicode #LinkedIn #assistive
linkedin.com 
“Formatting” social media posts by using special unicode characters (that, for example, look like bold text but aren’t) is one of the most common ways to create completely inaccessible social media posts. Joschi Kuphal’s screencast demonstrates the problem:
Most […]
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Privacy as Product
berjon.com 
Privacy is a strategic product concern that is key to digital businesses and should be treated as such, not a nuisance to be lawyered away with wobbly incantations.
Robin Berjon’s critique of the “underdeveloped and unsophisticated approach to privacy and data […] -
Growing up in Munich in the 1980s meant to be surrounded by graphic design from the Ulm School of Design: the corporate branding of Lufthansa, Braun and others, but most prominently the iconic work surrounding any remnants of the 1972 Olympics. An exhibition at Berlin’s Bröhan Museum marks […]
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“McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into […]
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The Optional Chaining Operator, 'Modern' Browsers, and My Mom
blog.jim-nielsen.com 
These are the kind of stories that would deserve so much more space in education and practice of technologists:
The real-life impact of our technical decisions really hit home to me once again: my Mom had trouble volunteering and participating in her local community because somebody […]
nytimes.com