I leave the nest to have an aneurysm for 48 to 96 business hours and there's over 10 posts in a row about accessibility and discourse. I sort of hate how social media has conditioned people not to cite the origin of a particular grievance in the vast majority of instances, so vagueries and outright disinformation are a standard part of any such telephone[1] package.
Cohost is a teeny-tiny little thing. I'm here for a good time, not a long time. As evidenced by the uh, multiple posts in a row that my tiny chunk of curated posters has brought into my vision cone, Cohost's myrriad issues of being a website with material limitations run and owned by imperfect humans has again become an awkwardly pressing subject.
[1]: An aside; recently I received a private comment regarding my use of the term Chinese Whispers, the person citing it as anti-asian or racist. The game Telephone was referred to interchangeably as Chinese Whispers in my public schooling. In my defense, considering the universal nature of the observation the game facilitates, American Whispers, German Whispers, Somalian Whispers, and Mexican Whispers are all equally valid titles. Telephone is kind of a shit title for the game, since the deficit is a fault with natural human communication, telecomms are very good at information transfer actually. We also did the Chinese Fire Drill growing up, a maneuver where-in everyone in a car stopped at a red light would get out of their seat, and rotate their position clockwise. You know, teenager shit. I don't think in either instance, anyone involved felt it was commentary about the broad topic of Chinese ethnicity or culture. But as the girls say, there is a bit of a heated gamer moment about anti-asian hate crimes/speech becoming very trendy in the U.S. and I'm trying to transparently avoid crossing a bridge whilst being Sweedish.
Cohost's Disability Discourse, Citations for your Reference:
I wanna give shout-outs to two people I follow here, who've put up I think 100% of the coverage of this topic in my feed via reblogs and their own commentary. First up is @silasoftrees, who has reblogged quite a few voices with various takes. A small compilation here:
- @basica11y, about Dark Mode
- @kukkurovaca, providing critique/ commentary of another poster, @Bigg, who is discussing staffing limitations of Cohost
- @indigotyrian, documenting Dark mode's update likely now being in progress
- @nora, commenting on the risk of shouting down critics/ detractors of institutions
Second up is @caffeinatedOtter whose running commentary has added some additional context (and maybe a few specific claims I would really like to know more about, EG Staff running damage control for their pals being shit). You can read their thoughts here:
- Tone Policing, and that staff-lead damage control I'd like to know about in greater detail
- A rebuttal to pushback against a Dark mode fix
Actual Content begins here:
Okay that's like, everything I can contribute in on-site citations. Let's talk about the grander scope of Disability guidelines for the internet. My very first hit whilst googling takes me naturally to the Americans with Disabilities Act website hosted by DOJ, Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA. Cohost is a U.S. company, U.S. legal rules about accessibility features are in fact a requirement for Cohost. Assume that E.U. legislation also will impact Cohost implementation. The site is probably big enough that if pushed, it would be pretty easy to say "mobilize resources to fix this" from a government perspective. But I don't know how big that is in detail, so your mileage will vary; I want to circle the wagons around this specific article and use it to open into a larger conversation.
Let's talk about Title III (Public Accommodations):
The ADA requires that businesses open to the public provide full and equal enjoyment of their goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to people with disabilities. Businesses open to the public must take steps to provide appropriate communication aids and services (often called “auxiliary aids and services”) where necessary to make sure they effectively communicate with individuals with disabilities.
A website with inaccessible features can limit the ability of people with disabilities to access a public accommodation’s goods, services, and privileges available through that website—for example, a veterans’ service organization event registration form.
For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.
Take-Aways / Thoughts:
This is not a hee-haw optional feature, it is in fact an actionable mandate which can have consequences that given Cohost's fragile state as an organization could be significant. Policy like this exists for a reason, the Government is often having to navigate the social dynamics of requiring extra work from private individuals so-as to serve the society in some capacity. These requirements address a larger and observable phenomena where a shockingly large amount of the population is differently able, and because of that we've had requirements like handicap-specific Ramps, Doors, and Parking Spaces. While not perfect, the policy represents an inherent understanding that enough Americans as a mass-noun are impacted by inaccessibility and the friction of those problems damages society.
In something I've I think written about Autism before, I used this concept of social friction to describe the impairment inherent to the disorder; particularly in the workforce and society at large. We still struggle with normal, everyday public dialogue about ASD being prone to outright slander, slurs, and eugenics ideation. The U.S. has a very, very long way to go about making its institutions and environments handicap accessible because many disabilities are not qualified. In particular, despite the full-body disorder compound PTSD causes, there is no avenue of basic disability income or diagnostic support for these cases. You also see gaps around the country's crises of substance dependencies, and as you can imagine, disability often arises from disfigurement caused via industry, shitty people, and profit motivations.
The U.S.'s track record here is not great. Systemic and frequent gutting of the EPA, FDA, and other regulatory bodies which are built for a reason hit the population constantly. Our own limits of understanding (such as the crisis of microplastics, the scope and specific features of climate change) are only one part of the equation, more limitations exist as industry pressure and minimal governmental attention. Disability is not profitable, it is an expense, and because of the inability to separate Government Services from Profit-minded Capitalist agenda, we constantly mistake gutting and blood letting the budgets of our institutions that mandate requirements for industry as streamlining and efficiency promotion. As it turns out, no, you do not help (for example) the Postal Service out by slashing their funding.
From this all comes the conflicts of Labor, Shared Values, and Action Cost. None of this stuff is free, it requires human labor to execute and it requires an agreement on the purpose and importance of the task. More-over, you are always in a limited action economy, so prioritization and efficiency have to be taken into consideration. Unfortunately for us, U.S. policy and society just does not have a particularly stunning pro-social stance towards the bulk of its actions, with an entire contrarian identity forming as a major political theory of 'anti-wokeness'. During a 3am phone call with a friend of mine, he drunkenly lamented how "cancel culture is damaging the economy", but couldn't provide more than a few errant and half-remembered examples (he normally doesn't call me at 3am while drunk, I'll let it pass this time).
Asking people to think about others means asking them not to think about themselves, and that is actually pretty hard for the self-absorbed average American who lives in a state of perpetual social isolation. Working people, especially the passing neurodivergent, are particularly sensitive to pushing themselves mentally to practice the emotional labor of self-regulation and consideration of their behavior. We understand this in Industrial Psychology and stress-oriented Cognitive-Behavioral psychology models of disease and social conflict, you have only so much capacity for mental effort to be emotionally and intellectually available, and as it turns out most people are not all that capable. Empathy is a limited resource, and present in my mind is how that is utterly absent in most online discourse, speaking to a broader conflict in spaces online.
This isn't a "can't we all just get along" cop-out, but rather, a gentle reminder that it is understandably difficult for a small website like Cohost to efficiently dedicate their resources to something that doesn't impact the staff directly. Their capacities as an organization are impaired by their ability to accomplish certain tasks and view the issues of the day and of their labor within a limited lens. Their social connections create a conflict of interest where-in detestable attitudes are likely given a pass because of an unwillingness to make a scene or damage a relationship over it. Value-neutral wording here, that's not how I would handle it, but I also am keenly aware that four (4) people who are developing a social media website is a very limited pool of people who will have comprehension of the ethical conflicts and power of inaction that characterizes social institutions.
To close out, I want to express my empathy for people who absolutely suffer without a Dark Mode option. Some days I'm one of those people, and today I'm not because the muscles in my eye are choosing to behave. I also want to express empathy for the Cohost Staff who are in a difficult position where they are doubtlessly attempting to balance their desires, the site's actual operational requirements via upkeep, feature development, and attempt to look moral and ethical as it's part of their branding. That's a difficult position to be in, and even with a team of four doubtlessly there are closed-doors disagreements about many things. This is the hidden need for actual management manifest in real time, and we shouldn't take for granted how large other sites are. Queer Spaces online will continue to strain under these constraints, and operationally speaking, developers should be aware of their legal obligations but are afforded very little that informs them forcefully.
I'm someone who's been trained as a Social Scientist, things I understand about my field are always in arm's reach when I think about anything. But to the average person, Social Science findings are unintuitive, contrarian, or too verbose. I try very hard to keep myself mentally flexible and consider what about the speaker will inform me of their emotional reality, and unfortunately it seems very few people possess that skill. Again, we're all operating as critters with limited resources and different abilities, this does not excuse bad development practices and policy, but it does provide an explanation. I wouldn't know the first thing about coding a website, but I do know what community management and an 80 hour work week feels like. I'm willing to accept the site's limitations to an extent, but it should be a focus to implement disability-friendly features in a timely manner. At the minimum, the U.S. Government is capable of arriving to a similar conclusion, and considering what passes as intelligent life in Congress, that's an accomplishment I would hope the Cohost Staff could see as motivation enough to prioritize the task.
Probably don't do damage control when a friend says bullshit, if it's bullshit, you're allowed to say "hey, dude, I don't endorse that" and move on. Better for your heart, stress is a killer.
