October 18, 2026 Dear Mr. Mullenweg, I am writing to you publicly as a blind daily screen reader user, an IAAP Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA), and the publisher of Blind Access Journal. Many of our readers, and many of my professional colleagues, are authors, creators, publishers, developers and site owners with disabilities who rely on WordPress every day. I am choosing to make this letter public because the decisions at issue were made in public, they affect a very large community of people, and that community deserves to hear your answers directly. My concern is your recent action on WordPress Trac ticket #50486, “Improve the admin notices accessibility”, and what it signals about the future of accessibility in WordPress. ### What the Ticket Was Meant to Fix Ticket #50486 was opened in 2020 to address a basic barrier. Admin notices in WordPress carry no semantics that identify them to assistive technology. When a notice appears, a screen reader user is not told about it, and a keyboard user has no way to move directly to it. In practice, people like me can miss confirmations, warnings and errors that sighted users see at a glance. The ticket was postponed through many release cycles. Earlier this month, a modest fix was finally committed. It placed notices in a navigable landmark and added a notice count to the page title, which is the first thing a screen reader announces when a page loads. After six years, it represented real progress. ### What Happened Next The change surfaced legitimate technical problems, including notice counts appearing on the Dashboard and in the block editor when no notices were visible, and contributors were actively working through fixes. Refining or reverting an imperfect change is a normal part of software development, and the revert commit that followed explained its technical reasoning clearly. My concern is not that the work was revised. My concern is how the decision was made and what accompanied it. Your first comment on this six-year-old accessibility ticket was an instruction to revert all of the work. In the same comment, you told Andrea Fercia that he no longer holds any WordPress.org positions or authority and was “invited to contribute your talents to another project.” No technical reasoning was offered on the ticket. As reported by The Repository on October 16, you later said in WordPress Slack that you were simply no longer interested in his contributions. I acknowledge that you also apologized for the temporary locking of his account and said that was not your intent. Mr. Fercia has contributed to 33 WordPress releases, has been a core committer for a decade, and is one of the most experienced accessibility specialists the project has had. Removing him in this way, on an accessibility ticket and in the middle of active collaboration on that ticket, sends an unmistakable signal to disabled users and to the people who advocate for us. ### A Pattern That Concerns Our Community This does not stand alone. In August, you declared that the Accessibility Team had overstepped its authority, usefulness and charter, and that any other team or committer could override its suggestions. In 2025, you proposed developing accessibility improvements as a canonical plugin rather than in core. Taken together, these actions make it difficult for disabled users to know whether accessibility remains a core value of WordPress or is now treated as an obstacle to progress. Accessibility cannot be optional for the people who need it. When it lives outside core, or depends on the standing of individual advocates, people with disabilities are the ones left behind. The effect on contributors matters too. Several respected members of the WordPress community have said publicly that they feel unable to speak freely about these events. A project that depends on volunteer and sponsored contributions cannot build accessible software if the people doing that work fear the consequences of doing it. ### Important Questions In the spirit of openness that the WordPress project has long championed, I respectfully ask you to answer the following questions publicly: 1. Do you consider accessibility a core requirement of WordPress, on equal footing with performance, security and usability, rather than an optional enhancement? 2. What is your plan, and the expected timeline, for making admin notices perceivable and navigable for screen reader and keyboard users, now that the work on ticket #50486 has been moved to a future release? 3. What authority and role will the Accessibility Team hold going forward, and how will its expertise be incorporated into decisions that affect disabled users? 4. What process and criteria were applied in removing Andrea Fercia’s roles, and what process will govern similar decisions in the future, consistent with the project’s Code of Conduct? 5. What commitment can you make to authors, creators, developers and site owners with disabilities that the tools they depend on will remain accessible to them? ### An Invitation to Respond WordPress powers a large share of the web, and its choices shape what millions of people, including millions of people with disabilities, can read, publish and build. Clear answers would go a long way toward restoring trust. Should you choose to respond, Blind Access Journal will publish your response in full and without edits, so our readers can hear directly from you. To our readers, and to everyone in the WordPress community who shares these concerns: I encourage you to read The Repository’s reporting and the ticket history for yourselves, and to add your voice respectfully and constructively. Sincerely, Darrell Hilliker, CPWA Publisher, Blind Access Journal

This is the introduction to the no longer in print Anthology, Artificial Divide. It talks about what a joy this book was to create and it makes a case for why we need more disabled writers publishing their own fiction stories featuring blind characters.

A webring connecting independent publishing houses across the literary landscape.

Shiraki Press seeks adult genre fiction with a hopepunk vibe. 18-70k words. No AI.

Outrage erupted Saturday after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta appeared to take down a social media account run by No Kings organizers — just as more than 3,000 No Kings marches got underway nationwide.“Meta pulled down the main No Kings Instagram accounts. We demand answers for why this happened during our ...

This is the introduction to the no longer in print Anthology, Artificial Divide. It talks about what a joy this book was to create and it makes a case for why we need more disabled writers publishing their own fiction stories featuring blind characters.

I've always had an understanding that the independent web was designed by humans and for humans. There were times that my inbox or forums I visit were solicited by people (and maybe occasionally agents) who vibecoded a project and were proudly sharing it as part of the resistance against the corporate web. That always felt totally antithetical to what is trying to be accomplished and achieved with regards to the IndieWeb. Take for instance this website proclaiming that the IndieWeb is punk. While I appreciate the intent of the message, it felt totally counteracted by the fact that the website was created with the help of Claude Code, and how the language on the website itself reads like what an LLM would output. How can you advocate that people should hand-make their Internet pages when yours itself is not? Now, I've only been an active participant on the IndieWeb for around a year, and I will stress that it is an incredibly loosely-defined movement and umbrella term. But the view and understanding of the subculture being pro-human and anti-genAI, just as it is anti-corporation, seemed coherent and widely agreed upon. If you read the AI policy article on the wiki, there seems to be a broad overall consensus. So, what do we do when the founding technical member of the IndieWeb has decided to use Claude Code in some of the most important IndieWeb projects? I briefly gestured towards this in an earlier post, but I haven't really reckoned with what it means until now. But I'm getting ahead of myself. ## Aaronpk? Let's start at the beginning. Aaron Parecki (known online as aaronpk) is one of the co-founders and the lead technical architect of the IndieWeb movement. Alongside Tantek Çelik, he co-founded the movement in 2010, with the main idea being to empower individuals to own their own identity, data, and web presence rather than relying on centralized social media silos. Parecki’s contributions to the IndieWeb as-we-know-it are incredibly foundational. He co-founded and helped organize the very first IndieWebCamp in Portland, Oregon in June 2011. He built and maintains Meetable, an open-source event-listing platform that powers events.indieweb.org and facilitates community gatherings. Parecki bridged the gap between IndieWeb concepts and technical web specifications. He's served as the editor/co-editor for critical W3C protocols: * Webmention: A protocol enabling websites to automatically notify each other when they link to one another, allowing cross-site commenting and conversations. * Micropub: An API standard for independent clients and posting apps to securely create, update, or delete posts on a user's own domain. * WebSub: A protocol for real-time pub/sub notifications, allowing for instantaneous decentralized feeds. Parecki also created much of the essential backend plumbing used by the community under his personal p3k project umbrella: * webmention.io: A widely adopted, free service that receives and aggregates Webmentions on behalf of independent websites. * Quill & Teacup: Micropub clients used to post text, photos, food logs, and check-ins directly to your personal sites from your phone or web browser. * Monocle & Aperture: A self-hosted Microsub reader and server environment designed to let users consume content in a decentralized manner. * OwnYourSwarm: A bridging tool to syndicate Foursquare/Swarm check-ins back to your personal domain; an example of PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site) philosophy. He is so foundational that the IndieWeb wiki has an article titled single point of Aaron, where "IndieWeb technology is being developed and there haven't been enough implementations to create proper diversity causing an over reliance on one of Aaron Parecki's services in order for the technology to work broadly." Parecki's personal website, aaronparecki.com, serves as a fantastic reference implementation of an IndieWeb-enabled site. There's location tracking, fitness logs, music, micro-blog notes, and much more. All built on his own infrastructure. And if you visit that site, you'll notice it was only a few weeks ago that he 3D printed a Claude Code mascot (with the help of Claude, of course), and that he's been using a local LLM model to generate cat pictures for his weather display. And if that was the end of it, that'd be one thing—I think it'd be weird of me to write this blog post if Parecki was just dabbling in genAI personally. But that isn't the case at all. What's happening here is that major IndieWeb projects, such as webmention.io, are being entirely reworked into PHP with Claude Code. The original Ruby code hasn't been touched since April of this year, and seems to be human-only and what I mirror on folk.zone. The same can be seen in the commit history of indielogin.com, which began having Claude Code as a contributor only around a month ago in mid-September. And the same for Meetable's codebase, IndieNews' codebase, micropub.rocks' codebase, and I'm sure many of Parecki's projects I haven't checked. Suddenly, if you have an anti-genAI stance, you have a reckoning on your hands. My website, for example, uses IndieAuth/IndieLogin for comments, I use Webmentions, I have Micropub enabled. The list goes on and on. ## The "Discourse" I can imagine the discourse going in several directions here. To start, the IndieWeb has always had an inherent fragility and over-reliance on Parecki's work. He could have decided to inject advertisements or malicious code into his code at any time, and many others (and I) would have been at the mercy of that. Instead, he has decided to use Claude for his many projects. You could also make the argument that there just simply isn't enough funding or attention for these projects, that people have been too passive and unsupportive of projects like these for human-only maintenance to be sustainable. Next—and I think this is actually important—the lowercase indie web is NOT the uppercase IndieWebCamp and the IndieWeb wiki. I have always tried to emphasize that it doesn't matter if you use Microformats2 or any of the other specifications and protocols listed on the wiki—as long as you made your website and it isn't just a mere account on a corporate social media platform, then you've succeeded and are part of the indie web. But of course, many people (myself included) still conflate the two as one-in-the-same. What comes up when you search "indie web," after all? Probably the wiki that's existed for over fifteen years. The "brand" that has merch and a logo. ## What Do We Do, Now? Many people who participate in the IndieWeb and who are passionate about the subculture aren't technologically savvy enough to fork and build their own human-made versions of Parecki's projects. Maybe there will be a few devoted, technical people willing to put in the work there, but it would take a lot of time and effort. It would be a good thing to have a more diverse selection of choices, don't get me wrong, but it does feel like a serious schism in a way. Or do we just bend the knee? Do we accept that generative AI is so ubiquitous that, even in a movement and subculture promoting humanity and our fight against corporations and their ruinous effects, it's okay that the major fundamental building blocks of the IndieWeb use the likes of a chatbot built by the corporation Anthropic? Do we just let the developers and programmers we rely on use the technology? Or do we just abandon uppercase IndieWeb altogether? Do we strip our websites of the specs and formatting and just simply wash our hands of the project that's been built for over a decade and a half? Obviously, I don't think there's an easy answer. I don't even know what I personally am going to do, here. I don't think I can overstate how vital and influential Parecki's technical contributions have been to the IndieWeb, regardless of his recent genAI usage. I am not writing this out of judgment or anger, but rather to just bring awareness to the situation, so people can make an informed choice for themselves. That's all I ever try to do. Somebody I look up to and who's been handcrafting his own (impressive) code for years has told me that he feels fatigued by having to feel angry all the time at genAI at this point. And I can sympathize deeply with how demoralizing it must feel, and that there is obvious burnout in trying to be proactive and vocal about this when there's a never-ending torrent of chatbots and genAI in our face every single day. I'd really love to know the thoughts of other people (yes, you reading) on this, I think it'll help me get a clearer picture. Maybe it will for you, too.

This is the introduction to the no longer in print Anthology, Artificial Divide. It talks about what a joy this book was to create and it makes a case for why we need more disabled writers publishing their own fiction stories featuring blind characters.

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Here's all my website posts for April. [The Hostage Negotiation of the Front-Facing Camera [He Learned the Gestures

"I wanted to see whether it was feasible and use the irony to illustrate a point..."

Here's all my website posts for April. [The Hostage Negotiation of the Front-Facing Camera [He Learned the Gestures

We’ve recently introduced a commenting feature in Nextcloud Text. Learn more about how it works and how your comments show up in Markdown. The post Nextcloud Text adds comments in Markdown files appeared first on Nextcloud.

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Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.

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Mood: Ready to parry. _Snap-hiss._ It is arguably the most recognized sound effect in cinema history. Ben Burtt, the genius sound designer for _Star Wars_ , created it by recording the idle motor of an old movie projector and mixing it with the electromagnetic hum of a television picture tube. To most people, that sound signifies "Cool Sci-Fi Sword." To me, a blind man living in a world of silent threats, that sound signifies something else entirely. It signifies _Hope_. Here is the thing about weapons in the real world: they are terrifyingly quiet. A gun is just a cold piece of metal that makes no noise until it is too late. A knife is a whisper of air that you don't hear until it touches you. Real violence is silent, sudden, and ambush-based. It is a world of silent alarms and suppressed malice. But a lightsaber? A lightsaber is honest. From the moment it ignites— _psshhh-shhh_ —it announces its existence to the entire room. It says, "I am here. I am dangerous. And I am right _here_." There is a profound safety in that auditory feedback. When a Jedi stands with a lightsaber ignited, the blade emits a constant, low-frequency idle hum. _Vrmmm… vrmmm…_ It is a rhythmic, hypnotic sound. It sounds like a large, mechanical cat purring in your hand. It vibrates. Even through the speakers of my laptop, I can feel the texture of that sound. It has grain. It has weight. For a blind person, this is the ultimate user interface. If I held a lightsaber, I wouldn't need to see the blade to know where it was. The sound design tells me exactly where the danger ends and the safety begins. When you wave it, the pitch constantly fluctuates. That pitch shift gives me precise data on the speed and arc of the swing. I can map the blade’s position in 3D space purely by the rise and fall of that magnetic hum. It is a weapon that grants me total spatial awareness without any extra effort on my part. In the movies, the lightsaber blocks blaster bolts. _Crackle-hiss._ But metaphorically, that hum creates a force field of personal space. It creates a boundary that sings. It pushes the silence back. I often wish the real world was designed by Ben Burtt. Imagine if obstacles in my path emitted a low hum like a lightsaber blade. Imagine if a flight of stairs announced itself with a distinct, static crackle. Imagine if bad intentions had a thrumming audio frequency. We live in a world that prizes silence. Engines are getting quieter (electric cars are terrifying stealth missiles to the blind). Technology is sleek and soundless. People are passive-aggressive and quiet. The lightsaber rejects all of that. It is a "force" in the truest sense—a presence that vibrates the air and demands to be acknowledged. So when I watch _Star Wars_ , I can't wait to hear that first _HISS_ A Lightsaber demonstrates to the world what the world could be if the world were designed for other people instead of immediate needs. Perhaps that's why so few actually listen to Lightsabers. They are scared of what their design reveals about the selfishness of the powerful. If you enjoyed this observation, you might enjoy Star Wars: Eyes Like Stars: A Star Wars Romance Novel by Ashley Poston

Updates from my website, along with the occasional personal essay or short story! I’m the worst at being a brand, so this won’t be a topical newsletter. Anything that comes to mind.

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The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30 kernel developers; i [...]

Follow the main RSS feed or find posts, pages, and categories/tags below. ## All tags and categories. * events (3) * keynotes (2) * event audio and video (1) * blog and journal (97) * guides (8) * rants (41) * new (1) * highlights (1) * newsletter (2) * news (1) * ai (8) * syndicate (35) * writings (33) * nonfiction (31) * travel (1) * journalism (6) * throwbacks (13) * fiction (7) * drm-free (25) * narrative (5) * review (3) * gaming (1) * books (6) * ebook (6) * paperback (6) * hardcover (6) * audiobook (4) * anthology (4) * comics (1) * syndicated (1) * satire (1) ## All Pages * About Sightless Scribbles and about Robert Kingett * Audio Description work. * Audio and video. * Books and Anthologies * How this blog is made. * Accessibility Consulting * Contact and book * Authenticity editing * Events overview * Frequently asked questions * Follow * Newsletter and free stuff. * Kingett's PodRoll. * Privacy, disclaimers, disclosures. * About my Reading. * Reprints * In person appearance requirements * Tip me * Tools and services I use. * My wish list. * Writing portfolio ## All Posts * Your cringe hate is dead. * The Ray Reunion * How to Download Assets from GitHub using a screen reader. * The Dream of Tomorrow * DIY Writers Retreat With a Travel Agent * Investigating the IP Relay Shutdown * How to talk about videogames (if you're blind) * How to convert Markdown to Shun manuscript format Using Pandoc * A Thermodynamic Failure of the Soul * Audible Exclusives limit disabled audiobook fans like me * The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and you. * Reject a Hit. A Series of Unfortunate Events * On the Attack Helicopter story by Isabel Fall * One Letter at a Time * How Keyboard Shortcuts are my Superpower * Hexodius [Xbox 360 Review] * Nihilumbra Review (PC) * On Access Trauma * Finally, there’s a comic book store for the blind * Plain Language Books Help You Get More Readers * Thomas Was Alone PS3 review * My Low Vision BearBlog theme * How to make portable Passkeys * We Need Diverse Disability Fiction * The Hostage Negotiation of the Front-Facing Camera * He Learned the Gestures * The 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner. * Grieving Alongside Water * Dead Skyrim Fan Lives on Through Mod * LOADING CARTRIDGE: THE_PURR_PARADOX.EXE * Where Home is Not Safe * The Braille Menu Conspiracy * The Bookstore Hope * The Ballot is a Doorstop, Not a Love Letter * The Kiss * How Fanfiction is Literary Resistance * Why "Happy Ever After" is Radical Restorative Justice * The Acoustic Signature of Weather * A Field Guide to the Personal Space Violations of Public Transit * The Cartography of an Open Palm * A Map of My Scars, Read by Your Fingertips * Third Grade Letter to Santa * The Colonization of Confidence. * The Home of a New Name * Into A Memory * Learning to Read Again * The First Snowfall * A Bridge Made of Ableism. * An Open Letter to the Future Man Who Will Hold My Face * The Cruelty of Many, The Grace of One * The Gift Horse's Mouth is Full of Terrible Braille * A Deserving Conference * The Death of Sherlock Holmes: a dated uprising * The Gospel of the Public Library * A Requiem for My Dignity, Sacrificed at the Altar of AI * The Kingett Guide to Free Pizza * The Conversation of a Kiss * My Refrigerator Thinks I'm in a Cult * A Conversation With a Voicemail I'll Never Delete * An Obituary for a Cookie * On The Violent Aerodynamics of a Pastry * A Sensual Exploration of Chocolate * An Ode to the Perfectly Weighted Object. * The 'Accessibility' link is a Lie: My Adventures in Weaponizing Corporate Virtue Signaling * The Weight of a Voice * I Love You More Than Books * On Hearing in Color * The Strange Comfort * The Automated Labyrinth, and How I Slew the Minotaur * On the Architectural Hostility of Doorknobs * A beta reader fed my draft to AI * My website is my safe space * The Web is Fantastic Actually * AI Audiobooks are not accessible * An Accessible Trip in Chicago * Response to ElevenLabs Partnership Inquiry * My small list of Critiques Against Substack * I think YouTube harms users and creators * Audio only Let's Plays With Audio Description. * I'm Afraid For You. * So you want to be my pen pal? * A Friend Used AI to Wish me Happy Birthday. * Why I left Patreon. * I Will Luddite AI * On TTS audio description * Maybe we should SMS again. * Getting started with static site generators with a screen reader. * Pass the Salt * How to Save the World- The Compassiviste Anthology: Volume One: Visions for Peace * Introducing the BOOK * We need bad representation in books. * How to sync Lire with Miniflux * We need less objective journalism * Appreciating spelling and grammar mistakes as a writer and reader. * Replacing apps for websites * Author visit details. * Diversity, disability, determination * I Want More Awkward in Romance books. * Why I love Insta-Love Romances. * My plain text workflow as a fiction writer. * Against Disability education * Thank you Romance writers * How to write a radio script in Fountain * Using indie publishers with a literary agent. * Some tips for Blind Audio Description writers * I Forget You’re Blind. * About me in my own words. * Mortified appearances * Why I read banned books. * Fediverse for writers/readers. * How self descriptions benefit Blind and sighted. * Online pitch events help writers and readers. * How to support writers without buying books * Different Literary Activism * Disability is not a bad word * Artificial Divide * Stereotypes deserve representation too * Submission accessibility guide for literary agents and editors. * Cancel culture hurts diversity * The #OwnVoices Conundrum * Chicken Soup for the Soul: Making Me Time * We should rehabilitate, not execute. * I wrote a letter to the judge that banned LGBT flash fiction. * Off the Grid: Living Blind Without the Internet

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@aisling@critters.gay @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social it's never a new opinion, either. It's always exactly the same opinion as every other rancid dipshit you've heard 5000 times online and off