The Best Of The Internets

NHSD Apply for Care ID alpha assessment

I love that the UK government is making digital product assessments, like this one for the in-development Care ID Assessment tool, public. There’s a lot to be learned from critiques like this.

In particular, I was impressed with how they held the line on the importance of robustness in tools like this (from the “Choose the right tools and technology” section):

Before their reassessment, the team needs to … allow users who have issues using services with Javascript or have Javascript disabled. The team must build services for all users and cannot depend on client-side Javascript.

Which yielded results in their reassessment:

The panel was impressed that:

  • the team has worked around the limitations for progressive enhancement of the service, resulting from the use of a serverless Single Page Application (SPA) architecture, which is a historical technology choice inherited from NHS login the team has ensured the service now works for all applicants without requiring JavaScript to be enabled
  • the team has used the third party Paycasso identity verification mobile application to automate many parts of the process for validating an identity document, presenting a significant improvement versus the current remote identity check process via video link
  • the team has used the no JavaScript route through the service which re-uses the business logic for the SPA route despite the UI forms being separately maintained for both routes

The assessment also provides guidance for further improvements to be made. Love this!

ChatGPT: New AI system, old bias?

The story of Karen Hunter asking ChatGPT to discuss whether Bessie Smith influenced Mahalia Jackson is pretty telling. As ChatGPT was not fed information that related to the connections between the musical careers of these two influential Black women, it could not shed any light on how they were connected. It could only offer snippets of their biographies, which it gleaned from Wikipedia (or similar).

Despite their seemingly magical “knowledge,” Large Language Models (LLMs) are only able to respond with things they know (or think they know). They aren’t able to create novel connections between subjects in the way that people can.

That’s why it’s absolutely critical that LLMs be trained on content from a variety of sources, perspectives, etc. A LLM is only as good as the data it’s fed. To create truly powerful, creative, and exhaustive LLMs, we need to train them on content created by people whose voices aren’t often centered and subjects that extend far into the long tail.

Disability, Bias, and AI

This is a foundational paper concerning AI and its potential to help and harm people with disabilities. There are a lot of choice quotes in here, but this one really sums up the importance of an intersectional approach to AI:

Integrating disability into the AI bias conversation helps illuminate the tension between AI systems’ reliance on data as the primary means of representing the world, and the fluidity of identity and lived experience. Especially given that the boundaries of disability (not unlike those of race and gender) have continually shifted in relation to unstable and culturally specific notions of “ability,” something that has been constructed and reconstructed in relationship to the needs of industrial capitalism, and the shifting nature of work.

Microsoft’s new Inclusive Design toolkit is designed for the brain

The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit has gotten an update that incorporates cognition, which is awesome! It puts forward three new principles:

  1. Understand the user’s motivation, and the goals and tasks they are trying to complete.
  2. Discern the cognitive load required to reduce that mismatch.
  3. Co-create the final product with a diverse community of people across the spectrum.

It’s so great to see this seminal resource continuing to evolve.

The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era

I feel this piece deep in my bones. If you are a PM, designer, or developer building stuff for the web, you owe it to yourself to give it a read.

I could quote the ever-living crap out of it, but I’ll just drop this one choice excerpt and let you take the rest in, in context:

[W]e’re not asking you to abandon your favorite frontend library on a whim and become a Rails developer, or a Phoenix developer, or a whatever. We’re simply asking you to acknowledge that for years you’ve completely hogged and dominated the #WebDev conversation, ignored our repeated attempts to point out the potential flaws, foot guns, and fallacies with the JS/SPA approach, and in some cases even ridiculed us for our choice of technology stack/language/etc.

CSS image()

The CSS4 image() function is really cool! It enables us to inject portions (fragments) of images, change image direction (flip), provide solid color fallbacks & more.

This is a great writeup from Kevin Powell.