James Scholes

Digital #Accessibility Engineer/Analyst, #ScreenReader user, and occasional #software developer. #a11y

Bluesky: @jscholes.bsky.social
Bluesky URL: https://bsky.app/profile/jscholes.bsky.social
Profile photo alt: A closely cropped headshot of a White man with light skin and a neutral (probably far too serious) expression on his round face. His short dark hair is parted in the middle and slightly longer on top. He is wearing a dark t-shirt and his large eyes look p
Pronouns: He/Him/His

Public Key

npub1kefujcvhuugvl3lshuqz4u7395fujfpn657rlw452yw6gr8l8kls7838tc

NIP-05 Address

jscholes_at_dragonscave.space@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstv57fvxt7wyx0clct7qp270gj6y7fysea20plh269z8dypnlnm0cprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntv0m9qd

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1kefujcvhuugvl3lshuqz4u7395fujfpn657rlw452yw6gr8l8kls7838tc

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Last Notes

2026-04-10 09:29:45 UTC

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There are some nations with country-wide JAWS licenses, but not enough of them. Only Colombia, Spain, and Hungary AFAIK.

2026-04-09 19:51:44 UTC

Are there stores selling JAWS Home subscriptions globally without payment method/residency/other country-based restrictions? I don't live in the US, nor a country with a distributor offering online orders.

2026-04-09 17:12:58 UTC

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I have three cards: one with a notch and one without. One of the notched ones has a small tactile dot on it.
So, I'm quite happy distinguishing between them as they are now. But if I got a third one with a notch, and/or more with dots on them, I'd find things less accessible.

2026-03-04 20:23:53 UTC

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No picadillo?!

2026-02-25 15:30:51 UTC

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Separate mobile version Ethan M. Marcotte considered a bad practice.

2026-02-24 17:03:09 UTC

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Well, quite. In Mexico, mail remains equitably undelivered to all.

2026-01-29 17:28:27 UTC

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Between ~late 2021 and ~mid 2025, there was a regularisation program to allow overstayers in Mexico to convert, in country, to a four-year temporary residency.
It's a shame so many people decided to just carry on winging it with something so generous on the table. All the people who took advantage will soon or already be legal permanent residents.
@npub147t…r6d6

2026-01-28 15:31:14 UTC

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Separately: I spent the entire time reading this filled with anxiety that you were going to bring up the different ways to determine which keys were pressed in JavaScript.

2026-01-28 15:29:50 UTC

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"However, Alt—otherwise known the Windows key—opens the Start Menu."
This isn't accurate. Alt and Windows are separate keys, and the latter is what opens the start menu.

2026-01-28 13:27:11 UTC

Read a book review on my timeline that didn't mention the title or author.
Went to reply in confusion because the book sounded interesting, and realised the details were in the content warning and I have those completely disabled in my client.
Please don't use content warnings like email subject lines.

2026-01-19 04:30:30 UTC

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We have one of those in our town in Hidalgo. Now I'm wondering how widespread this concept is.

2026-01-10 15:14:36 UTC

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I love that they do. I'd be lying if I said I thought most of them retained their humour when transformed into text though. Granted, maybe I wouldn't have found some of them funny in the first place if I could see them.

2026-01-06 15:19:55 UTC

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Huh. I never knew I could snort and vomit simultaneously.

2025-12-31 22:10:29 UTC

It's interesting (in a completely non-judgmental way) to see from all these end of year posts how many books different people read in a year.
I'm someone who feels a bit lost without a good book on the go, and I usually read at least two (and sometimes up to six) books each week. Some people would undoubtedly consider that too many, but I unashamedly read for pleasure and entertainment rather than analysing and reflecting on each title in detail.
That does mean that books have great reread value for me, but also that in certain weeks I read more titles than some people do in a year. I work full time, but watch very little television and movies and don't play a lot of video games.

2025-12-12 21:47:32 UTC

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Which part of the country are you in? I live in Hidalgo close to the Querétaro state border.

2025-12-12 20:29:24 UTC

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Eating 25 dollars of average American fast food in Mexico: we are so middle class right now but do you have any salsa for these fries that don't taste of much?

2025-12-06 16:42:54 UTC

A severe #accessibility issue I've seen very few people talking about is the widespread adoption (in my country at least) of touch-only card payment terminals with no physical number buttons.
Not only do these devices offer no tactile affordances, but the on-screen numbers move around to limit the chances of a customer's PIN number being captured by bad actors. In turn, this makes it impossible to create any kind of physical overlay (which itself would be a hacky solution at best).
When faced with such a terminal, blind people have only a few ways to proceed:
* Switch to cash (if they have it);
* refuse to pay via inaccessible means;
* ask the seller to split the transaction into several to facilitate multiple contactless payments (assuming contactless is available);
* switch to something like Apple Pay (again assuming availability); or
* hand over their PIN to a complete stranger.
Not one of these solutions is without problems.
If you're #blind, have you encountered this situation, and if so how did you deal with it? It's not uncommon for me to run into it several times per day.
why do you think this is not being talked about or made the subject of action by blindness organisations? Is it the case that it disproportionately affects people in countries where alternative payment technology (like paying via a smart watch) is slower to roll out and economically out of reach for residents?

2025-10-31 18:24:16 UTC

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Probably an excellent move for accessibility (including audio description).

2025-10-27 18:58:15 UTC

Sometimes, I know I haven't been drinking enough water. I have a full flask of cold water next to me, and an empty glass ready to go. And yet, I end up just sending one more Slack message, checking my email one more time, listening to that WhatsApp voice message somebody sent me... and not pouring the damn water.
I know some people use water reminder apps or similar solutions, but I don't think that would help. I know I need to drink water, I'm just not doing it.

2025-05-25 20:08:26 UTC

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This is a fundamentally inequitable and illogical stance. If blind users cannot install the OS without help, there will be fewer of them to benefit from a robust accessibility implementation, and what blind users do exist today are the subjects of survivorship bias.
It also continues to perpetuate the exclusionary belief that disabled people should need to "plan" (your word) to carry out tasks that others can do on a whim. They do not have an army of helpers available on demand to pick up the work that a project isn't prioritising.

2025-05-22 19:01:53 UTC

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Indeed. I do think this question hits differently if someone is knowingly asking it to a person with a disability or other accessibility needs. @npub1247…zzvh

2025-05-18 02:32:46 UTC

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Thanks @npub13kr…5ak0 for the tip that yt-dlp can download from RSS feeds. Here's the command I came up with to download all available podcast items from a feed in chronological order (oldest first) to nicely numbered files with the title and date.
yt-dlp --no-abort-on-error --color "no_color" --download-archive ".download_history" --windows-filenames --embed-metadata --embed-chapters --playlist-items "::-1" --output "%(n_entries+1-playlist_index)02d %(title)s (%(upload_date>%B %d %Y)s).%(ext)s" --format bestaudio "https://example.com/rss"

2025-05-17 16:07:26 UTC

Any #commandLine #podcast downloaders people enjoy using? I'm thinking that I point it at an RSS feed (or for bonus points a podcast on Spotify/Apple/whatever), and it downloads all episodes to nicely numbered files in a folder.

2025-05-14 02:25:31 UTC

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I don't get it. Do the tools run locally based on some remote input from the LLM? Or is the code uploaded to be executed in the model's own sandbox?

2025-05-11 18:12:00 UTC

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Well, they can be a pain to read in braille, and quite verbose in speech if they're being encountered over and over again. But as a one-off you're fine :)

2025-05-11 17:00:49 UTC

Peak Mastodon: in response to the recent #Linux #accessibility content that's been going around, a sighted person indicating that they're confused because when they tried a #screenReader last year, it worked fine for them.

2025-05-08 02:47:32 UTC

I'm physically located in #Mexico, and just tuned into an Irish #radio station only to be presented with this quite chilling message in Spanish warning off illegal immigrants.
Of note is that despite the announcement beginning with "I'm Kristi Noem," I'm pretty sure this is not the voice of the Secretary of Homeland Security. I'm not even sure if Kristi Noem speaks Spanish, let alone with the polish of a professional voiceover artist. The first three letters in the name of the referenced CBP Home mobile application are also spoken in English.
Additionally, this station doesn't usually run ads before their stream starts, but clearly the streaming provider has been convinced to run this anyway.
https://media.dragonscave.space/media_attachments/files/114/469/925/287/447/048/original/3de8c07503bd3375.mp3

2025-05-08 02:05:30 UTC

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Missing: the words "music star" after "country".

2025-05-07 21:08:13 UTC

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It's like a Brexiteer's wet dream

2025-04-30 13:54:58 UTC

I'd never read the section of the WAI-ARIA spec about aria-label until today. Some lowlights:
> The purpose of aria-label is the same as that of aria-labelledby.
This is unnecessarily confusing. They mean that both aria-label and aria-labelledby are used to give something an accessible name, but you'd be forgiven for reading that sentence and thinking they work in the same way.
> Most host languages provide an attribute that could be used to name the element (e.g., the title attribute in [HTML]), yet this could present a browser tooltip. In the cases where DOM content or a tooltip is undesirable, authors MAY set the accessible name of the element using aria-label.
Cool... the spec for accessible web applications casually implying that the title attribute in HTML is something worth using.
#accessibility

2025-04-30 00:26:19 UTC

The post-download open button in Chrome now receives a checked state when pressed, even though it's just a regular push-button and not a checkbox.
And like, this has zero screen reader impact beyond hearing the word "checked", but how does this even happen? How does someone look at a simple, single-purpose button and go, "You know what this needs? A temporary checked state when it's activated!"
Was this written by a human at all? If so, what was the thought process?
#accessibility

2025-04-27 16:07:03 UTC

I saw a post from someone at a conference saying that they walked out of their hotel to buy a bagel, and instead ended up in the middle of an unexpected antiques show in the street. It got me thinking about how #disability affects spontaneity.
Not in a depressing, woe-is-me sort of way, but from a practical, logistics point of view. Sadly, for many #blind people, this might've gone something like:
Blind Person (BP) to First Hotel Person (HP1): "I want to get a bagel from <bagel shop name>."
HP1: "We have bagels in the hotel, if you'd like me to take you to the restaurant?"
BP: "No, this bagel shop was recommended to me and I've been looking forward to trying it. It's only across the street."
HP1: "Well... I'm not sure. Let me check if anyone is available."
[BP sits awkwardly in lobby for 10 minutes, not knowing if they'll be there long enough to fold their cane or not.]
HP2: "Hi, my colleague tells me you're heading to <bagel shop>; I can take you there now if you're ready?"
BP: "Yep, let's go."
[BP and HP2 head out of the hotel.]
BP: "Wow, what's all this noise?"
HP2: "Oh, there's... an antiques fair I think it is? Happening this weekend outside the hotel."
BP: "Nice. What sort of stuff do they have?"
HP2: "It looks like furniture, pots... stuff like that. We're just here at the bagel shop, let me get the door. One sec."
[HP2 leads blind person inside, leaving them in the hopefully capable hands of their next unexpecting helper and then running back to the hotel as quickly as they can.]
[BP enjoys a bagel, before repeating the whole charade again to get back to the hotel 35 minutes later.]
What they don't do is: explore the antiques fair, pick out a nice piece for a loved one, wander off to find a quieter spot after finding the whole thing ultimately overwhelming, discover an idyllic inner-city oasis, or any number of other things non-disabled people might do without thinking about them upfront.
Living life as a series of planned transactions, all with a defined end point, can be exhausting.

2025-04-25 06:27:08 UTC

Can anyone explain why this #regularExpression, when combined with this text, causes multiple parsers to crash or spend hours unsuccessfully looking for a match? I tried #Python and #nodejs.
Regexp: ^(([0123]:)?[a-zA-Z-\d]+\s*)+$
Text: DescriptionListBoundary roleButton nameDoAllParkingFacilitiesHaveTheSameEnforcementRules stateButtonCollapsed
#regexp #regex #programming

2025-04-13 23:50:03 UTC

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For science, I have to ask: did you turn it off?

2025-03-31 20:28:38 UTC

Recent datepicker experience:
1. Control is presented as three separate spin controls, supporting the Up/Down Arrow keys to increment and decrement the value as well as manual typing. But because they're not text inputs, I can't use the Left/Right Arrow keys to review what each separate one contains, only to move between day, month, and year.
2. I tab to year.
3. I press Down Arrow, and the value is set to 2075. I'm unclear how many use cases require the year to be frequently set to 2075, but I can't imagine it's many so this seems like a fairly ridiculous starting point.
4. I press Up Arrow, and the value gets set to 0001. The number of applications for which 0001 is a valid year is likewise vanishingly small.
5. I delete the 0001, at which point my #screenReader reports that the current value is "0". Also not a valid year.
6. Out of curiosity, I inspect the element to see which third-party component is being used to create this mess... only to find that it's a native `<input>` with `type="date"` and this is just how Google Chrome presents it.
A good reminder that #HTML is not always the most #accessible or user-friendly.
#accessibility #usability

2025-03-23 23:33:30 UTC

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Is this an order, a recommendation, or a past tense description of an activity?

2025-03-17 19:11:30 UTC

Today I learned: If you use #Chrome and are annoyed by those "Sign in with Google" dialogs stealing keyboard focus on certain websites, you can disable it at the browser level.
In the address bar, type or paste in "chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi" (without the quotes. You should land on the "Third-party sign-in" Settings page.
On that page, there'll be two radio buttons: "Sites can show sign-in prompts from identity services", and "Block sign-in prompts from identity services". Set it to the second one, and you should find that the problematic dialogs are no longer present.
#accessibility #screenReader

2025-02-19 14:49:29 UTC

I didn't know @npub1sv0…rq9x was on the fediverse (although in retrospect it's not surprising). I am but a small fish in their customer pool (excuse the mixed metaphor), paying only for a single VOIP line. But it has been rock-solid for years and they seem like good people.

2025-02-16 17:10:59 UTC

Decided to sign up for #Codeberg, the #GitHub alternative that the Fediverse at large is insisting is worth a try and, in some cases, claiming will improve project contributions by avoiding some of the GH antipatterns. I expected to find some #accessibility issues; this is the modern web, after all.
I did not expect a fully inaccessible visual CAPTCHA with no workarounds. I'm unable to solve it, so I cannot create an account.
In short: If you want people who are #blind or #lowVision to contribute to your projects (you do, right?), Codeberg is currently not an #accessible platform.

2025-01-24 15:20:15 UTC

The #BBC is looking for a Head of Digital #Accessibility, with the role only open to #deaf, #disabled, and/or #neurodivergent applicants. Hybrid working, based at any UK BBC hub. Salary up to £110,000.
https://careers.bbc.co.uk/job/Head-of-Digital-Accessibility/811220202/
#jobs #a11y

2025-01-09 19:49:02 UTC

I really want to give a positive review to the host of an Airbnb Experience I attended recently. Unfortunately, I'm not sure which of the unlabelled links in their email to choose. Maybe "t3s6S0VG" means five stars? Then again, it could be "fxq2V6ci", "Sc2yVOPh", or even "sABCEL6T". And I'm sure one of those will report them and get them banned. #accessibility

2024-11-21 19:11:47 UTC

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I completely agree with the use case; adopting cattrs+attrs for a similar purpose has been the best change I've made to my development practices in the last year. Pydantic itself just makes me itch.

2024-11-21 16:23:02 UTC

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I wonder how I might take to them as someone who really doesn't enjoy Pydantic.

2024-11-20 17:11:42 UTC

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Plastic cheese.

2024-11-14 16:59:33 UTC

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FWIW, I treat all transactional reviews of professional, non-fiction resources as slightly circumspect, regardless of the source. It's too easy for people to pay for review generation and bulk score massaging. On the other hand, a lot of genuine human reviews have a low signal-to-noise ratio:
* Good ones: Often posted way too soon after obtaining the product, otherwise people forget. But that means they don't really have much experience with it.
* Bad ones: often people just venting, usually about something that doesn't belong in a review.
Note that I'm in no way suggesting that you would indulge in any bad practices. I raise it more to point out how I treat reviews myself. Until I try the product, I don't know if I trust its creator, and therefore I don't know if I trust the reviews either.

2024-11-12 17:59:42 UTC

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1.
`<a aria-expanded="false" href="#" class="menu-link">`
This should be a button (`<button>`), because it performs a function on the current page.
2.
`<span role="application" ...`
`role="application"` is a way of telling a screen reader that this widget performs all of its own keyboard accessibility and focus management, and that the screen reader should disable its own. This is never the case for a menu toggle, let alone a `span` inside of one.
3.
`tabindex="0"`
This makes the icon-holding `span` inside of the `<a>` focusable, i.e. users can tab to it. Instead, the parent `<a>` (that should be a button) should be the focusable thing.
4.
`aria-expanded="false"`
The parent `<a>` (that should be a button) already has `aria-expanded` on it, to inform screen readers whether or not the menu is currently open. Having it on the icon holder is unnecessary.
5.
`aria-label="Menu Toggle"`
This applies an accessible name to a control with no accessible role/semantics, because it's just a `span`. The `<a>` (that should be a button) should have an accessible name instead, e.g. "Languages sub-menu".
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The practical outcomes of all of this are:
1. When I tab through the page, I initially hear: "collapsed link Languages. Languages Menu Toggle collapsed link". That's a lot of speech to get across a pretty simple concept.
2. When I tab past that, I hear: "Menu Toggle collapsed". Note the lack of any sort of accessible role on this control, to tell me what the hell it is. Note also the fact that it doesn't say it relates to the "Languages" menu.
3. When I use the screen reader's own cursor to navigate to the toggle instead, I hear: "collapsed link application collapsed Menu Toggle". Note the multiple collapsed states.
4. When I press Enter on the toggle, I get: "Menu Toggle collapsed. Menu Toggle collapsed. graphic". It doesn't expand, and I now have no idea what the heck just happened.
5. If I try to move around the page at this point, my screen reader cursor has stopped working, because the toggle has told it that it will handle everything from this point (`role="application"`). I suspect many users would just bale out here, if they haven't already.
6. To actually expand the toggle, I have to press Enter a second time, and then either tab into the expanded content or use an advanced screen reader shortcut to take back control.
@npub13dm…lj2t

2024-11-12 17:45:17 UTC

What the fuck?
```
<a aria-expanded="false" href="#" class="menu-link">
Languages
<span role="application" class="dropdown-menu-toggle ast-header-navigation-arrow" tabindex="0" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Menu Toggle">
<span class="ast-icon icon-arrow">
<svg ...>...</svg>
</span>
</span>
</a>
```
I know @npub13dm…lj2t will get a kick out of this one.
#accessibility

2024-11-08 15:10:55 UTC

Imagine describing Alt+Tab as "popular", rather than, you know, critical in allowing non-mouse users to operate their computers: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2514044/windows-11-24h2-breaks-popular-alt-tab-shortcut-heres-what-you-can-do.html

2024-11-05 16:35:28 UTC

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Honest question: why? What practical benefit(s) will reaching a specific number of stars bring for @npub1l0c…kt92? @npub1myh…wcr5

2024-11-04 21:48:45 UTC

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Do you know of any resources describing this in more detail? I'm confused about who is fighting over what.

2024-10-17 19:27:24 UTC

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There is no way I would do anything productive until month five.

2024-10-14 03:17:13 UTC

As many meat and poultry products are being recalled due to possible listeria contamination, is the information about those products available via an #accessible, searchable webpage? Nope, only a crummy, untagged PDF.
Meanwhile, the entire webpage about the incident on the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service website is identified by #VoiceOver as being one giant link, making the actual link to the aforementioned crummy PDF unusable. Outstanding.
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/brucepac-recalls-ready-eat-meat-and-poultry-products-due-possible-listeria
#accessibility

2024-10-13 16:01:32 UTC

I favourite a lot of cool stuff on Mastodon. I'd love a service to go through that stuff on a regular basis, pick some of it at random, and remind me of it. Maybe by email, DM, or whatever.
Note: last time I mentioned using favourites in this way, Mastodon's corrections brigade came out in force to tell me I should be using bookmarks instead. Please don't do that again.

2024-10-09 23:04:33 UTC

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Would it be a paid engagement? This question isn't intended as an impertinence; there are a lot of projects who can't afford paid accessibility consulting and I don't want to make a recommendation that isn't useful.

2024-10-09 17:58:00 UTC

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I'm sorry, I don't feel comfortable discussing actions which may recklessly lead to fire, destruction of property, and a danger to human and other life. Perhaps you'd be interested in some more productive forms of expression? @npub18vj…g4zy @npub1kym…59km

2024-10-07 19:29:28 UTC

The correct answer to the question "do #audiobooks count as reading?" is not a simple yes or no. It's "yes, now please stop gatekeeping".

2024-09-29 00:23:52 UTC

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"My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing."
I'm now intensely curious how this conversation came about. Did it happen over a family Sunday lunch, or...?
@npub1he7…mmdk

2024-09-26 15:50:23 UTC

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As a British person, this proposal initially brought some unexpected images to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_Food

2024-09-06 17:23:57 UTC

Fresh out of the kitchen for my birthday: lemon and raspberry cupcakes, and mini Bakewell tarts, all with homemade raspberry jam. Who needs a traditional cake?