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Reader Feedback | Some Tidbits Links Provide A Bad Reading Experience

Released: 4/17/2020

Author: Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher, Top Tech Tidbits

Greetings everyone. My name is Aaron Di Blasi and I am the Publisher of Top Tech Tidbits.

I wanted to share with all of you an email that I received from a Top Tech Tidbits Reader on April 16th 2021.

I am sharing their feedback here, and my subsequent response, because I believe that other readers might feel the same way, and I would like for all of our readers to be able to share in this information.

In their email, our reader states the following:

"Hello. I have been getting Top Tech Tidbits for many years now but am disappointed with the current links. I find that many of the links take me to a site that insists that I subscribe to their website or supply my email details or are so full of ads that trying to read the article concerned becomes a tedious chore. Are all of these checked for ease of use for the average screen reader user? It is a bit of a wade to get through the many items that are sent now and I would appreciate a way to simply read the information that I find invaluable when I can easily access it and I wanted to pass this on." Regards, Tidbits Subscriber.

In response, I offer the following:

Dear Reader,

Firstly, please know that all of us here at Tidbits understand and share your concerns. It is true that Top Tech Tidbits has expanded the scope of information provided since Mind Vault assumed publication in June of 2020.

The challenge we face is that we have no way to control the behaviors of the websites that we refer you to for news updates each week. And sometimes those news updates can be really important.

And while we do indeed vet each link that is submitted for both accuracy and accessibility, I'm afraid that neither requesting a subscription, asking for an email address, nor showing ads on the site constitute inaccessibility. I do however agree with you on both a personal and professional level that each of these things make for an extremely poor reading experience. Our only remaining option, therefore, would be not to include these articles, but I'm afraid that in doing so we would also be doing Tidbits readers a great disservice.

In short, I agree wholeheartedly that the web could offer all readers a much more user-friendly experience. The Top Tech Tidbits website, which is under our control, utilizes no ads and asks for no subscription fees (thank you to our sponsors and supporters) although even we ask visitors for their email address so that we can send them Tidbits. :)

In addition to heading schemas for each and every page the Top Tech Tidbits website also utilizes HTML5 tags in the structure of its design to tell your screen reader where the navigation is on the page and where the content is on the page, so that your screen reader is not left trying to figure that out for itself.

We would very much like for other websites to implement these types of measures as well, but in the meantime we have chosen to keep you informed. Simply because we believe that the greatest inaccessibility is no information at all. We sincerely hope you will agree.

Thanks so much for reading. We look forward to keeping you informed.

Aaron Di Blasi, PMP
Publisher, Top Tech Tidbits
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