Archive for January, 2019

I’ve torn my calf muscle. This is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone.

It’s frustrating because I haven’t been able to train for two weeks now. I got back in the pool to try and keep my fitness up but even that is uncomfortable. I’m literally on like week 6 of my #RoadToKona and I’m already having to take at least a couple of weeks off.

Luckily, I’m under the skilled care of Dr. Venla.

Earlier this week, I did Leeds Bike Mill‘s introduction to bike maintenance course. It’a four-hour evening session to teach you the basics. Leeds Bike Mill is based in the same building as the Peddler’s Arms, a drop-in bike workshop that is community run.

It met my expectations: it wasn’t as clean and polished as the Evan’s Fix It course, but it was far more hands on. That is far more valuable than watching someone else do it. So, even though four hours seems a long time to change a tyre, do an M check and fiddle around with the brakes, it’s sort of understandable where that time went.

We also covered gears, which both Evan’s and Woodrup didn’t really do, so it was nice to take a look at that because gears are always my biggest problem on the bike. Unfortunately, I didn’t get time to do any adjustments in the workshop itself and on the way home my chain fell off. Still, a chance to ride my old bike has eliminated any buyers remorse about the one I am riding now.

All in all, I would recommend if you want to cover the basics of bike maintenance.

After my PT described me as the “least flexible person she had ever met”, she talked me into giving yoga a go. As Yoga Hero is just across the water from the office of a client I am currently working with, I’ve been attending their beginner’s classes.

They know their audience. They have a special lunch flow class designed to avoid getting you sweaty, something I am sure colleagues will be pleased about.

They run two beginners classes a week. Monday’s class is taken by Sophie which is quite strength and stretchy. You come away feeling the burn. Friday’s class is taken by Anna. That’s a bit more focussed on the mental aspect of yoga and I find it a little more relaxing. Both are fun.

One thing I would like them to add is a double-slot class. Anna’s classes end with a relaxation session where you use a blanket, close your eyes and spend some time being mindful. I feel that would transition really nicely into an hour-long nap, and I would pay twice the money for it.

Many of the clients I consult with are based around Leeds. And, where possible, I like to walk to their office. But sometimes it is just not practical because of time, or distance, or needing to get around multiple places.

The solution: cycling to their offices.

The timing is pretty poor. It’s cold and dark almost the whole time at the moment. But, if I can manage it now, it’s going to be far better in the summer.

Worfolk Anxiety is predominantly an English language website. However, for years we’ve also had some of our best articles professionally translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

As of this month, we’re also making content available in French, Estonian and Polish. Depending on the results, we’re looking at adding more languages in the future, allowing an even wider audience to benefit from our help.

Last month, I attended the Evans Fix It course on bike maintenance.

It was supposed to be an hour’s course and cost £15. As it was, we ended up getting an hour and a half of tuition for our money. It covers the basics: parts of the bike, the M-check, changing a tyre, cleaning and a little bit on adjusting gears.

There were only two of us on the course, so it extra friendly, and we were able to look at specific setups for our bikes. We call ran disc brakes, for example, so could skip over the rim brakes content pretty quickly.

Plus, we got to see the secret downstairs area, and you come away with a goodie bag containing cleaning products, a multitool, tyre levers and a patch kit. All in all, therefore it was great value: 90 minutes of learning, plus a load of useful stuff that I needed anyway.

The only drawback was that it was a demonstration, rather than a hands-on exercise. I was a guinea pig for a course at Woodrup the week before, and in that we got hands-on, changing the inner tube on a tyre. There is no replacement for actually doing it.

I would still recommend the Evans course, though, because it is still a bargain. Ideally, do both. I’m not naturally mechanical, so I’m looking for all of the learning opportunities I can get.

As a charity trustee, I’m certainly no stranger to being targetted by dishonest people. Individuals regularly pay for their insurance or gym membership by setting up a Direct Debit using the charity’s bank details and companies never check; they just take the payment. It happens so much that we’ve had to disable Direct Debits on the account.

But I was, well, impressed is the wrong word, but certainly noted the attention to detail that a recent scam attempt had taken.

I received the following email:

Hi Chris and HNY,

How are you?

Can you arrange a payment today by bacs ? Let me know so i can send
you the Recipient details.

I look forward to getting a quick email respond.

Thanks!

Best regards.

Laurence Eccles and Dr Chris Hassall

I’m the current treasurer of West Yorkshire Humanists, and Laurence and Chris are the co-chairs of the group. So, this sounds like a legitimate email. But it’s from an anonymous gMail account, who had I responded, would have almost certainly asked me to pay a large amount of money to an account they control.

They have clearly targeted us individually, though, researching the name of the committee members and setting up the appropriate fake email.

I’m currently working with a client to improve the accessibility of their website for visually impaired users. This has involved a lot of time working with screen readers. As part of that, I have found a rather weird bug with Mac’s VoiceOver. It keeps saying the word “simul”.

Which isn’t a word. Maybe it’s saying simmul or simmel, or something else. None of these are words.

It happens when we give it a range to read. Something like “4-6”. The screen reader says the first number, then goes suspiciously quiet and says simul, and then starts building back up to regular volume as it gets to the final number.

I even asked about it on Stack Overflow, and everyone else was confused, too.

I wondered whether it might be a language issue. So, I tried adding a custom pronunciation, and double-checked the HTML tag had a lang attribute set to en-gb. Alas, no luck.

This is only a problem on Mac: TalkBack on Android works fine, for example.

In the end, I was able to get it to read correctly by changing the voice. By default, macOS comes with Daniel Compact set as the voice. However, when I switched to Daniel, Kate, or Kate Compact, it read it out correctly.

In a way, this is frustrating, because there is no much we can do to fix it. It’s a bug with the voice in Mac. But it is at least somewhat comforting to know that I wasn’t making some obviously silly mistake.

What do you do if you need to scale your Scrum team? Ideally, have multiple teams and use one of the many fine methods for scaling with multiple teams. But what if you want to scale a single team? To say, 30 people?

This was the situation I ran into with a recent client. They had an important project and lots of money to throw at it, and they wanted it all to be one team.

You might think “but there is no way that could possibly work”. And you would be correct. It didn’t work that well. But, having no other option, we did find some hacks that made it easier. I’ll present these below.

Kim’s Corners

Doing a stand-up with 30 people is tough. You might think it took ages. But it didn’t. We got done in 15 minutes. There were so many people (in a special meeting room we had to book every day) that people kept it short and sweet. From that point of view, it was a good learning experience.

But it wasn’t useful. There was so much stuff going on that nobody could remember what everyone else has said. Most people did not even try. They just tuned out for most of it.

So, we moved to Kim’s Corners. Each workstream had a corner and we went around one corner at a time. The people in that corner listened to each other intently, while only taking a high-level overview of what the other corners said.

Goldfish Bowl

Having a retro was also challenging because there were so many people wanting to weight in. To solve this, we used the Goldfish Bowl technique.

This involves having five chairs in the middle of the room. Four people sit on them, with one empty chair. Everyone else sits around in a big circle. Only the people in the inner chairs are allowed to talk on the topic at hand, and the discussions are time-boxed to five minutes. The group can vote to allow another five minutes if required.

What if you are sat on the outside? You go into the circle and claim the empty chair. At which point, someone from the inner circle is obliged to get up and go back to the outer circle, freeing up a chair to be the new empty chair. Anyone who has a strong opinion can take a chair, but without too many people talking at once.

Refinement Lucky Dip

30 people were too many people to have sat around looking at a Jira board and pointing stories up. So, we used a lucky dip system in which five people were randomly selected to attend backlog refinement sessions.

Anyone else that particularly wanted to be involved, perhaps because they had the a specific knowledge or interest in a piece of work that was upcoming, was also welcome to attend. But they were not required or expected to attend otherwise.

You’re trying to make your website accessible. Lovely stuff. But because screen reader technology is so bad, you need to add a bunch of inline span tags with the aria-label attribute on them so that you can add additional context, or, more usually, use some kind of hack to get around a screen reader bug.

This works well. However, it also splits the whole thing into separate groups. Consider the following example:

An annual subscription costs £20.00 per year.

Looks good. Except for VoiceOver on Mac and iOS, and probably other screen readers, too, will read out something like this:

Pound two zero zero zero

Oh no! It totally ignored the decimal point and now your user, if they are able to track the weird way it read out individual numbers, thinks that your product costs two thousand pounds. So, our old friend the Aria label is here to help.

An annual subscription costs <span aria-label=”twenty pounds”>£20.00</span> per year.

Hurray! It now sounds like normal language. But it’s still confusing. Now the screenreader reads them out as three separate blocks. “An annual subscription.” “Twenty pounds, group.” “Per year.” The user has to navigate through all three of them even though it is one sentence.

The fix

To fix it, we can use the role attribute. Sometimes.

If we set it to role="text" it will work in WebKit. For example:

<span role=”text”>An annual subscription costs <span aria-label=”twenty pounds”>£20.00</span> per year.</span>

Now it will read out the entire sentence as one string, but still using the Aria label.

Is role=”text” a thing?

No. That’s the drawback. it was proposed to be included in the Aria spec, but nobody could agree on whether it should be a thing or not. So, it was left out. Therefore, it is not implemented everywhere.

It is implemented in WebKit, so will fix the problem on Chrome, iOS, etc. But it won’t fix it in some other browsers. And, you might get pulled up by linting tools and validators because it is not part of any formal specification.

Where can I put it?

Anywhere you like given that it is a made up attribute.

But there are some things to be cautious of. It should only go on a block of text where you do not mind losing any of the context inside of it. If you have an element inside the paragraph, for example, that should be treated as a separate group, then leave it off.

It shouldn’t on headings because you don’t want to lose the context. Instead, put a span tag inside the heading with it on.

Also, you need to ensure you are using the aria-label attribute for anything inside. Normally, you can use an abbr tag with a title attribute and the screen reader will read out the title. However, if you wrap it in a role="text", this will only work if you use an aria-label instead/as well as the title attribute.