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Showing posts from November, 2022

2022-11-28: Summary of "What makes web data tables accessible? Insights and a tool for rendering accessible tables for people with visual impairments"

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Figure 1: Based on the guidelines and the study, the authors built a browser plug-in to make the table more accessible. Tables are an excellent medium for sighted people to understand the data's structure and contents. They are popular in many online documents, including news articles, government reports, and online applications like bank statements. It uses many visual metaphors that sighted people can quickly notice. Those metaphors facilitate an understanding structure without explicitly explaining the complex system. But you can imagine how hard it would be for people with visual impairments who need to use a screen reader, which linearizes all this information. Imagine how confusing it would be when the user's cursor is on top of an empty cell. For example, the screen reader doesn't say anything. The user might think they didn't press the key or need instruction of guidelines to access the multilevel merge cell. Yanan Wang et al. recently published a paper on “ Wh

2022-11-16: ODU CS 2022 Trick-or-Research Event Trip Report

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The Department of Computer Science (CS) at Old Dominion University (ODU) held its fourth annual Trick-or-Research event on Monday, October 31, 2022. A hybrid approach was used for the lab tours this year. Participants were able to visit labs in the E.V. Williams Engineering & Computational Sciences Building (E&CSB) and Dragas Hall in addition to the virtual ones via the Gather.town platform. There were a total of 11 different ODU research labs participating in this year's event. A lot of preparation was required on their part went into making this another successful event. Each group decorated their virtual and physical labs, prepared posters, planned demonstrations, and even packed bags of candy! Candy bags✅ passports✅ stamps✅ @oducs is almost ready for the "Trick or Research" @WebSciDL @ODUSCI @odu https://t.co/MFdFpu867Y pic.twitter.com/xB6g0xsuoa — Sampath Jayarathna (@OpenMaze) October 31, 2022 Faculty, staff, and students showed off some a

2022-11-02: David DePape's blog on "frenleyfrens.com" was crawled by Bing by at least October 24, 2022 -- four days before the attack on Paul Pelosi

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  Screen shot from:  https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/exclusive-two-far-right-websites-attributed-david-depape-fabricated-created-friday-deleted-today/ An October 29, 2022 article in the Gateway Pundit about the October 28, 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi stated: It looks like this is all another far-left conjured-up lie.  The websites reportedly connected to Paul Pelosi’s “friend” in his underwear are likely fakes. Part of the author 's reasoning is "[t]he only activity on this site as well was in the last two days", referring to the screen shot above of the TimeMap of "frenlyfrens.com/blog" at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.   The author is conflating crawling of the web page by the Wayback Machine with the creation of the web page, and then arriving at the conclusion that the web page was created on October 28, 2022, the day of the attack.  This is most clearly stated in the slug used in the article's URL ( emphasis mine): https://www.t