It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year!
Greetings from North Texas Radio,
We would like to wish y’all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
As part of the season’s celebration we will be presenting special Christmas programming. Starting from 6pm Christmas Eve – Texas time – throughout Christmas Day, we’ll be streaming nonstop Christmas music. The songs will be a mixture of classics and rarities. As usual it won’t be “safe” for work or kids but then again… North Texas Radio has never been safe.
David
Web Design for Accessibility
Leroy Anderson
The Typewriter (Composed 1950 – 1st performance 1953)
Posted on YouTube by
Aleksandr Trofimov
I’ve been setting up the site for keyboard accessibility and ran into a problem on Safari. Using the tab button on the keyboard, the sidebar was being skipped. Turns out in Safari Settings in the Advanced Tab you have to check the box “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage”. The navigation works fine in Firefox, Chrome and Edge by default.
Safari Settings>Advanced Tab>Check Box – “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage”
As I was going through sources to add to this list of links it became a rabbit hole. I’m scoring 94-100 on Google PageSpeed insights for accessibility, which is a good start for basic settings. On some of the sites I looked at though (which had paid services coincidentally) I scored pretty bad – one of them even said my site was breaking the law, WTF.
I’ve tried to list the most helpful free sites.
— David
Resources
Microsoft – Accessibility/Disability Support
Apple Accessibility Features
AbilityNet – Digital Accessibility Free Resources
ADA – Fact Sheet – Web Content and Mobile Apps
Tools
Google PageSpeed Insights
Wave – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
W3 -Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List
A11Y – Checklist
Dictation
Talk, talk, talk, it’s only talk
Comments, clichés, commentary, controversy
Chatter, chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat
Conversation, contradiction, criticism
It’s only talk, cheap talk
— Adrian Belew
King Crimson
Elephant Talk (1981)
Posted on YouTube by
Bill Bruford
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The table shows the basic dictation commands. Using a mic hooked up to or on your computer is pure gold. Getting off the keyboard when you can saves an incredible amount of time.
It’s pretty simple, might take a few days to get it all down and get used to it but you gotta keep it up. I tend to fall off.
Mac – Commands for Dictating Text
Dictate Text on iPhone
Microsoft – Voice Typing
Dictate in Microsoft 365
Voice to Text on Android
Dictation – as assistive tech
I used Grok to compile the tables and set them up as .csv files, exported them to Excel, and then pasted them in the WordPress tables.
They’re all pretty similar to each other with a couple of extra commands in Excel and Word. I needed to learn how to set up tables in WordPress, so there you go.
— David
We Have the Technology
We have the technology
Not available before
We have the technology
But thinkers and poets of the past
Oh, no
They had to leap into the dark so blindly
— David Thomas
Pere Ubu
We Have The Technology (1988)
Posted on YouTube by
Dzhakhar 96
Changes to the site (other than style):
On the Desktop, Tablet/iPad (landscape mode) will pretty much be the same.
On a phone, the Home Page is just the sidebar without the center content.
The sidebar has a list of the Recent Posts now so they can be accessed from there. Anything else will be on the Archives Page.
The main thinking behind the changes was trying to make it easier on mobile phones to just listen to the station and see what’s playing. I’ve cleaned it up too, works a lot better.
Still working on a few quirks, but it’s more or less back to normal.
— David
Hello world! V3
The Beatles
Get Back (January 30, 1969)
Posted on YouTube by
jose navea
Under Construction – I’ve been having issues with a few things on the site. Add-ons were conflicting with each other and I need to move away from proprietary page builders that lock you in. Their support is generally substandard.
I’ll name and blame – Elementor – For any ticket you send in they want your login info or it won’t be submitted, I had a question over the file system and in the ticket I explained that I had a backup on my computer that I was working with so I didn’t need anything done on the site. Just an answer to my question.
Their response was that they were unable to log in and asked for my info again (I put fake login info in the ticket). I’m reluctant to let anyone poke around to begin with and this was back when I was working on syncing with eBay and had customers names and addresses, I’m not giving that out.
As far as locking you in, to rebuild your site it’s a huge pain in the ass. It uses its own proprietary markup and database entries which can break the site and leave content and metadata after uninstalling. I nuked the site and am doing a fresh install.
I’m currently using the basic WordPress with Gutenberg blocks and it uses HTML markup, and can be moved to other platforms without a hitch. It can be easily converted to basic markup, plain text, rich text and so on.
— David
ETA – The Now Playing and Previously Played Archives are a priority.
DNS Propagation
Currently, the site has been having some issues, it was moved to a different server and it takes up to 48 hours for the DNS Records to make their way around the world. Hasn’t cleared here, should be fine for most everyone else.
There’s a big X right over Dallas, I can feel it.
DNS Checker – DNS Check Propagation Tool – dnschecker.org
DNS Propagation Checker – Global DNS Testing Tool – whatsmydns.net
DNS Propagation Checker: Real-time Global DNS Status – Site24x7.com
DNSMap – Worldwide DNS Propagation Checker – Global test – dnsmap.io
DNS Lookup – dnslookuo.io
For North Texas Radio – whatsmydns.net
ETA – It changes quickly with red Xs popping up here and there, then turning in into green and others turning red, it’s not as smooth as I thought. I figured it would be like a wave. This is a few hours later but it will be completely different in a minute.
— David