Adding things to enable accessibility can be a pain, but just imagine how frustrating the world is to those with the disabilities these features are supposed to aid. I have two people in my family whose eyesight is extremely limited--and they're the lucky ones whose disease won't render them totally blind.

I've done some alt text myself in the past along with other kinds of coding meant to differentiate text meant for one audience from text meant for another. But I haven't done it for any of my books, which are not illustrated, which have no equations or odd types of text, and which can be read to a person out loud by various electronic means at no cost. And I believe AI is behind such free resources, so let's put one check mark in the "Good" column.

Alt text for an image for screen readers, when an image is not a "necessary" part of the narrative, is marked as decorative. This instructs the screen reader to skip over that image and continue the reading order without considering the image.

If an image is essential, then alt-text needs to be written with as minimal language "polishing" as possible, focusing on being direct and descriptive instead.

MS Word: It has been 3.5 years since I last prepared accessible documents (I did for AODA, not ADA, but they are similar. AODA is for Ontario, Canada), but what I recall is that MS Word was very problematic with accessibility, and we often needed to use Acrobat to resolve post-MS Word issues. It almost always ruined the read order (how a screen reader understands what to read when), and table headers were also problematic. Math equations were non-existent, although MS claimed screen readers recognized their language (they did not). We had to write them in MathML using software that did what it claimed, or write the formulas, take screenshots, and then write the description in alt-text to explain the formulas. It was not fun when I had to create hundreds of documents.

If you are using MS Word to do accessibility stuff, I am unsure if MS has upped their game. These issues I mentioned were all in Win 11 and office 365. It is not MS's style to update things to fix; they usually change things in the next major version or SKU.

I haven't heard of this before. I got my merger announcement months ago, and then later one that said it was complete. As far as I know, from looking at my D2D page, I have no duplicate books, everything is still set to go where it was going. I didn't have a lot on SW by this time, though. I never really got going over there, kept most of my stuff in KU or just on Amazon in general. Maybe I got lucky!

We just saw two big box turtles on our driveway after a rainstorm! Two at once. Woo-hoo!

(Maybe some baby turtles in our future? I saw one here a few years ago--had not seen one in decades. What a thrill that was.)

Well, speak of the devil, I guess; I saw the first dragonfly of the season on Sunday afternoon.  Nice to know there's at least one around.

There's also a garden spider--Argiope aurantia, a.k.a. writing spider, a.k.a. zig-zag spider--in the yard.  Some folks on the internet have mentioned that the invasive Joro seems to have displaced the native garden spider on their properties, and that was a concern of mine, too.  So seeing this one is a nice sign.  Perhaps the two species can coexist after all.