Derek Featherstone

Same prompt, different results.

Teaching an AI your voice usually means copying how your writing looks, with little attention to the reasoning behind your choices.

My friend John Allsopp built an open live feed for AI agents at AI Engineer Melbourne, so I sent my agent, Ellis, in my place.

The productivity trap in coding with an AI: you finish faster but maybe understand less.

Six patterns from 80 voice-mode conversations, how my use shifted from quick hits to structured huddles, and the habit I'm encoding into accessibility tools.

Thoughts and reflections on some principles that help create conditions for great accessibility work

Tools I've used in my tech life that help my son in school

How I learned to better collaborate with AI.

In order to be more inclusive as teachers, presenters, speakers, facilitators (and a long list of other things we do in life where we communicate), we need to develop the skill of audio describing our own presentations.

Just finished reading Ignore Everybody from Hugh MacLeod.

The meaning of shift left has changed over time.

This is (at least in part) what intentional inclusion looks like.

Passages that make me say YES!!!

In which we better understand what it means to be purposeful with respect to accessibility.

I'm going to try something different for reading in 2021.

Cleaning out the office and I found a piece of paper that is 47 years old.

I'm trying out Notion as an all-in-one planner and productivity app.

Here's a little bit about how my perspective on accessibility has changed over time.

I learned CSS a long time ago.

I learned a few new tricks with Zoom over the past couple of weeks in our house, with everyone here under quarantine.

I've been teaching a remote, hands-on workshop and here are my quick thoughts on how it has gone, and what I've learned.

Yes, there's lots of remote working tips and tricks out there, but this is the stuff nobody will ever tell you.

Here's some ways you can start speaking.

I ran a remote team for 7 years and here's some things we did that remote work feel right.

Learning Gatsby means learning React and GraphQL, and I'm ok with that.

Thoughts and musings two years after we became part of Level Access.

I worked up to building a pull out drawer in the cabinet under our kitchen island.

I've been fixing one small thing in my house/life each day in 2020.

Taking FOBI into my own hands

I had a 537 day streak of doing the wrong thing.

Lessons and insights after tracking my time for 24 hrs a day for 6 weeks.

We didn't know, but he did, and he should've told us.

What does a change of pace really mean when you're teaching a workshop?

Bullet points aren't about what you put on the slide.

As you launch into a new year, begin with the end in mind.

What does it take to make something accessible to everyone?

Explicit, implicit, content-based: the three kinds of relationships on a page that decide whether assistive technology users can actually navigate it.

Three simple things you can do to improve keyboard accessibility in your web page or application.

Automated infinite scrolling is a popular web design technique even though it creates difficult accessibility problems for keyboard users.

There's an emotional aspect to accessibility that makes it difficult to determine exactly how we should design for a particular persona.

In the physical world, it is nearly impossible to make a fixed object accessible to everyone.

Infographics are growing in popularity, but they are often criticized for the accessibility challenges they create.

I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing in our work until these three things happened all at once: we dove deep into the process of redesigning our web site and brand identity, reviewed 2013 successes and failures, and started planning for 2014.

Good alt text is seen as critical for people that use screen readers.

A flawed design coded perfectly is just as bad as a brilliant design coded poorly.

Important accessibility details get lost in the handoff from design to code.

Accessibility doesn't have to cost a lot, but here are some sure-fire methods to ensure that you pay more than you need to.

Sometimes we're blindfolded, even to our own actions.

Disability and the concept of accessibility can be confusing.

Adding accessibility to your work can feel like everything-at-once.