Debilitatingly Shallow

This week in class, we learned about Accessibility, Usability, and Inclusion. I ran the text from my earlier blog post through the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Calculator, and it appears that my blog is not likely to be comprehensible for most average web users. I feel like this is because most of the blogs are commenting on a college-level course. In the lecture this week, our teacher cited the Center for Plain Language and its statistic that "the average web user can understand English content at about a seventh-grade level," but advises writers to write at a fourth or fifth-grade level. I wasn't even sure how to write at a fifth-grade reading level. The statistic took me aback so much that I went down a rabbit hole on the Center for Plain Language website. While some of the links didn't work, one led to a UK government website on  Content design: planning, writing and managing content which provided some fascinating information about how people read. Picture from -...

hotpot.ai/art-generator The image on the left features a focused light bulb on a table with a living room in the background. The image on the right depicts a bedroom with a large window. "Creating an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone," according to an article in MIT Technology Review from 2023. It's funny to me that the AI image generator created images of a light bulb and an empty bedroom when given the prompt "How much energy is used to create this image?" One would think that a charging phone marked as 100% would have come more easily to the generative AI. This image was created because of a prompt at the end of the Copyrights Online lecture. This week in class, we explored the concept of the public sphere. In this context, the public sphere refers to the "collective social sphere in which important conversations affecting the group freely take place." We learned about writing for the public good by utilizing ...