Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Hello, Dreamwidth! We've got a quick update this week, so in the interest of not making the intro longer than the update, I will get right to it.

Development

Development this week brings us an exciting new bunch of themes -- we added 12 new themes for 4 different layouts. We also did a bunch of backend fixes and code cleanup, plus committed the ability to rename communities in addition to the ability to rename personal accounts. A full list can be found in this week's code tour.

All of these fixes won't be live until the next code push.

Accessibility

One of the things DW really tries to keep as a major priority is accessibility for people with disabilities and people who use assistive technology. We have a project team devoted solely to accessibility, with their own project community: dw_accessibility.

Every single study we've seen, however, says that there's no One True Way that assistive technology users work. Therefore, we need as many perspectives as we can find. If you have accessibility needs, or access DW through assistive technology (screenreaders are the most obvious example, but there are many other forms of assistive tech), please consider joining or watching dw_accessibility. The more perspectives and ideas we hear in the community, the more we are able to make DW accessible and useful for everyone.

Our developers care very deeply about universal and accessible design, and we want to make sure that the site is useful and usable by everyone. If you have a few minutes a week that you can use to give feedback on how you use your assistive tech, or what methods you would find most useful for your own personal needs, please give us a hand.

Community Promo

On that note, this week's community promo theme is disability-related communities:

* cookability: A community focused around accessible cooking, including sharing tips and recipes on how to feed yourself on a limited energy budget.

* disability: A general community for discussing disability and providing support.

* fucking_meds: A community for kvetching and griping about your medication, with bonus side benefit of sharing what works for you (and what doesn't).

Got a good disability-related community? Share it in the comments.

Payments

We've had a few people ask recently if we accept VISA gift cards for payments, or let us know that they've had problems while paying via VISA gift card. We do accept them! When you're filling out the form, you'll still need to add a name, address, and phone number in order for the payment to be processed, but gift cards do work the same as regular credit cards.

As always, if you have any payment-related problems or questions, you can contact the Account Payments department (aka, me) by opening a support request in the Account Payments category.

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That's it for us for another week! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

We'll see you next week for our next update.