Front page pictures

Accessibility, Blog Meta, Photography

The front page to my website https://bracken.fun shows a random image each time you load it. Every now and then I add some new pictures and remove ones I’m tired of.
I enjoy refreshing the page over and over and readjusting the size of my browser window for each image to an aspect ratio I like for that particular image. Each one has a different shape that I enjoy most.
For example, I like this one to be tall:

A green volkswagen bug in a junk yard with a perfect patina.

But I like this one to be very wide and to make it look like the guy is sitting on a bench made by the links:

A black and white picture of the Portland Japanese garden where a man is peacefully reading a book in one of the stone gardens.

Anyway, I added some more pictures today.

If you’re using a screen reader on the front page I also have a short description of the image. Sometimes it’s just describing what is literally in the picture, but I also try to make it a little weird sometimes so that it’s as fun/weird an experience as for sighted users. My hope is that everyone visiting will think to themselves at some point something like “huh, that’s weird”, or “oh, that’s actually kind of pretty”.

Blog year in review

Blog Meta, Personal

OK, you caught me… I’m just writing this so I can post something in December and have a more complete blogging year. Sometimes filler posts can be excellent because there are no expectations! Not this time. Sorry.

Anyway, I wanted to post something each month this year, which I didn’t quite accomplish, but I did post more than 12 times, so that kind of counts. My real goal was to be more open and sharing of myself with friends and loved ones and to scratch a little creative itch. I think I definitely succeeded at those goals despite having much more I wanted to do.

Accessibility of this blog

Blog Meta

I’m just getting this blog all setup today and noticed really quickly that the theme I’m using is missing some basic accessibility features. For example, the blog header doesn’t insert the alt text I have set in the meta data for the WordPress media object.

Having found that in the first place I looked probably means there are a bunch of other problems too. I tried to fix it really quick but my WordPress PHP skills weren’t good enough so I’ll have to revisit this. I’ll post some updates as I work on it and try to submit the fixes upstream to the theme maintainers.

You can see here that it doesn’t even try right now: