Member-only story

Spot the imposter

Mickey Mellen
2 min readAug 22, 2021

--

When dealing with a professional of any kind, you expect that they know the lingo. For example, I’m not very knowledgeable about how a car works, but if I’m talking to a mechanic and I mention that I think I might have an issue with my transmission, and he responds with “what’s a transmission?”, I know I’m in trouble.

Here are four that I see quite often, and each makes me question things a little bit.

Banks that require password changes

Our bank requires us to change our password every 90 days, yet they can offer no good reason for it. Both Microsoft and the FTC have said that such changes are silly to enforce, which makes me question the security that the bank offers.

Our bank talks a lot about how secure they are, but doing this kind of “security theatre” erodes a lot of trust.

An SEO expert that says “alt tags”

When describing an image for vision-impaired users, “alt attributes” are essential. For a normal user, if they say “alt tags”, we know what they mean. For a web professional (particularly one that focuses on SEO, where these are crucial), there is a big difference between an “attribute” and a “tag”, and they should know better.

An accessibility expert that uses #lowercasehashtags

--

--

Mickey Mellen
Mickey Mellen

Written by Mickey Mellen

I’m a cofounder of @GreenMellen, and I’m into WordPress, blogging and seo. Love my two girls, gadgets, Google Earth, and I try to run when I can.

No responses yet