asphericalcritic

let the crows into your heart

  • she/her

lyra; poet, critic, letterpress enthusiast

lover of crows, myth, metamorphosis, crows, tea, birds, nature, shadows, crows, crows
(i frequently share nsfw posts, fyi!)


jessfromonline
@jessfromonline

Accessibility is not an easy topic. The uncomfortable truths of issues like conflicting access needs force us to come to terms with incredibly uncomfortable limitations around equal access—what happens when someone needs light & someone needs dark? But even outside of those worst-cases, navigating accessibility is complicated. No one is perfectly positioned to do so; the reality of lateral ableism is that there is no perfectly informed, universal perspective, even among disabled people—I am fallible, as are all disabled people.

But given some of the accessibility discourse on cohost lately, I want to present a few pieces of perspective. First, some background.

Labor & Venture Capitalism

There is a common misunderstanding around what a “left-wing” approach to goods & services looks like. I agree that the “customer cooperative” in which customers have primary control (rather than investors) is better than corporation,1 but customer cooperatives aren’t communism—labor is entitled to all it creates. I have such a distinct memory of visiting a labor co-op grocery store for the first time and getting basically ignored by the staff who were hanging out and chatting and realizing: good. Work sucks. I’m a customer. I’ll get my food eventually. I’d rather they were having a good time, and I’d rather live in a society where the experience of being a consumer is worse but my experience of work is better—work makes me miserable, not bad customer service.

So when we talk about “accessibility” is worth asking: accessibility for who?

When we make strong—even harsh—demands of venture capital-funded corporations, or of states/governments, we do so knowing that they are spending billion of dollars trying to get us to click on ads or bomb people overseas; this is money that is wasted or worse, that could be spent on increasing accessibility. There’s no excuse for it. Making it the service accessible would not introduce difficulty for employees, as long as the organization redistributed resources from pointless or awful tasks to accessibility. This is good and justified.

When we make demands of tiny organizations—like cohost—we are not making demands of people who have resources they are aren’t using/are misusing.

In cohost’s case, we are also making demands of queer disabled people. When we are harsh to them, we are harsh to queer disabled people. When a cohost employee has to read constantly about how they’re ableist and demands that they reallocate resources they may not have—more on this point below—while struggling with how their own disability interferes with their ability to do their job & work enough to keep it extant, that is not accessible for a disabled person. This is, to a mild degree, a conflicting access need.

The question is: who is the priority, the laborer, or the consumer?

I want to live in a society where in most cases, the answer is the laborer. This is difficult calculus, both because of the difference in numbers (there are more consumers than laborers in this case) and the fact that “your demands aren’t important enough” (often on the logic “there’s not enough of you disabled people”) is constantly used to dismiss disabled people.

But let’s come back to this, after revisiting what I alluded to above.

Sustainability & Resources

One of the most frustrating misconceptions I saw during a lot of dark mode discourse is that implementing a more accessible dark mode—which is a good & eventually necessary thing—would actually increase business by increasing the pool of users & potentially paying users.

This is not true.

Accessibility is, in a very large number of cases, not good for business. It’s still necessary, and right, and part of why capitalism is fundamentally at odds with disability justice is (among other more significant reasons) that it is not profitable to serve minority cases. Protections like the ADA are necessary for this reason.

The number of people who would be able to use cohost with better dark mode vs. the time it would take to implement it well enough to actually serve that purpose vs. the time spent on other revenue generating features does not come out in dark mode’s favor. It doesn’t, and if you think it does, you’ve never been a part of a software business in a way that put that kind of data in front of you. Such work is time consuming, and the potential users & revenue from other features is orders of magnitude different.

It’s still right to do.

But, as I’ve talked about before with disability and accessibility, sometimes what is right and what is possible simply do not line up,2 in ways that contemporary discourse rarely wants to grapple with. Sometimes—as I have seen in socialist organizing contexts—increasing certain kinds of accessibility requires allocating resources in a way that implementing would (or did) fully collapse the organization. You do actually have to make the decision sometimes that we cannot be accessible to a certain disabled minority, because you cannot exist if you do, and something isn’t accessible if it doesn’t exist. I have seen such demands lead to the end of important resources that were actually uniquely accessible to other categories of disabled people.

Again, this is not the same of making demands of Twitter or the US government. They have the resources. They’re just not using them the right way. But your local voluntary organization—or a strappy non-VC labor-owned startup like cohost staffed by disabled people—does not have plentiful spare or misused resources to reallocate.

cohost is not financially sustainable. It is more sustainable than it was, but without changes, it will cease to exist. Every change that isn’t working towards that puts cohost at risk of no longer existing—honestly, quicker than you might think. Dark mode is right, but it isn’t profitable—it is the choice to take another small (cumulative) risk to help a small number of people because it is the right thing to do.

And every decision about what to work on faces this calculus. It is, at a personal level, an exhausting thing to sit with—so let’s go back to that.

Labor Revisited

cohost is a place you spend a bit of time. cohost is something a cohost employee spends 40—let’s be real, more than 40—hours a week working on & worrying about. cohost is something that pays a cohost employee’s rent. cohost is something that provides a disabled cohost employee health care.

When cohost is inaccessible to you, you potentially lose social connections and community, or experience physical symptoms attempting to access it. And that sucks. It really does.

When working at cohost is inaccessible to a cohost employee, they risk losing money for rent and their health care and their ability to seek care for their disabilities.

These are not the same scale.

I would rather we live in a society where some services are less accessible but my job is more accessible. By G-d I wish jobs were more accessible. Getting there will require revolution—which is also not very accessible, by the way, but also worth it—and it will also require us as disabled people to accept certain forms of accessibility getting worse so that they get better in more important parts of our lives. It’s difficult to accept this bargain with something like cohost (or a local voluntary organization) because you aren’t getting the other half—without systemic change, it’s not getting better for you elsewhere.

But I want to model the society I want to live in. I would rather the disabled people in leadership at my local socialist org (and all the disabled people benefitting from their work & those finding an accessible home in other rare ways) get to continue providing and accessing what they do, even if it’s sometimes worse for me. I would rather the disabled person making this website not worry every day that their livelihood or access to health care for their disability is under threat than to prioritize the consumer. There is a limit to this—it’s a difficult choice, and this calculus can be wielded like a cudgel to dismiss legitimate concerns. But, at the very least, I am not going to call staff ableist for prioritizing choices that protect the sustainability of cohost (and the people cohost is more accessible for than other websites) and most importantly, their well-being as disabled workers. That matters more to me.

It’s not that staff doesn’t care about accessibility, or that they shouldn’t, or that they shouldn’t be asked to. I know they do care, and want to be asked. Admittedly, I have an advantage in holding that trust, given I know staff personally, and because I have been staff (kind-of, temporary, part time, was not a co-owner which is a categorically different level of responsibility) and I know that when I was looking for work I went down the feedback forum and sorted it by order of feedback and tried to take the top items that I had to skills to complete. I know there are staff members within cohost who see user democracy as a priority, and I know user feedback is valued and welcome.

When you ask staff to make a unsustainable business decision to service the needs of a small number of disabled users, you are asking them to put the project and their own care at risk because those users deserve access. To some degree that’s necessary—at the very least, they need to know the need exists, and how many people are experiencing it. I’d rather not make staff’s difficult task & dilemma emotionally harder making incorrect assumptions and judgements about them in that process. And I want people to understand the gravity of what they are asking, even for small things. When cohost staff struggle to work given their own disabilities and when cohost right now runs out of money and requires seeking more (non-VC, non-equity, no-ongoing-control) funding regularly, which will eventually spell the end of cohost if it doesn’t start meeting its expenses, it’s serious. Taking a few days3 off of actually profitable features is a real risk (especially given they’re never being demanded to do just that one thing) and the alternative of staff just working more puts a real, very intense strain on disabled people. It’s ok to ask—but that is what you’re asking, and I want people to understand the gravity, and do it with empathy.

In the end, I’d rather a labor co-op than a customer co-op. I’d rather staff not experience 24/7 anxiety about their holistic well-being & access to care and safety as a disabled person & would rather cohost continue to exist even when cohost doesn’t always meet my own accessibility needs. I’d rather my local voluntary organization have the time or budget to meet some people’s accessibility needs than cease to exist trying to meet them all. I’d rather be ignored at the grocery store.

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding. cohost is a shorter game with worse graphics (made by people who are paid less to work more by the way.) I am willing to accept the drawbacks, because that’s the world I want, and because I know it may very well be the only way cohost continues to exist. I will keep saying what I think need to change, and politely, and kindly, and I will be understanding when their ability to do so is limited. If you want the same things—the same world—I hope you’ll consider doing so too.


  1. But still extremely limited. My local customer co-op grocery store is probably better than a for-profit, but it's still doing union-busting, gentrifying, and being shitty to homeless people. Customer democracy is not inherently left-wing. Hell, worker democracy is not inherently left-wing (see the history of racist white unions) but, in general, the customer is generally less right than the worker. I say more on this above.

  2. I get pretty spicy about the topic of organizing & communism & what is possible with accessibility in the back half of this episode of the Cosmonaut podcast where I’m interviewed about communism & disability.

  3. I promise a given feature is always more work than you think it is. It's common knowledge that a software task is always more work than a software developer whose job it is to work on those things think it is—let alone someone who hasn't worked on that particular software and/or that particular type of feature. You are not accounting for every case, and bad can be less accessible than no change at all. Don't be that person who says "I just wish the devs would do ______, it'd be easy" about a video game.


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in reply to @jessfromonline's post:

I appreciate you also mentioning lateral violence, because I'm seeing a very unfortunate tendency on the Left, and this is true of most online Leftist spaces that I've seen, of deciding that if you can't reach the people who are actually causing the problem, you hurt whoever you can reach and rationalize it as activism. I've seen multiple leftist schisms where people on both sides did this exact thing and it's disturbingly easy to justify.

Solidarity with the oppressed, including workers and the disabled, does not look like finding the group of people it is appropriate to mistreat and hurt.

(also people on every side need to be way more open to criticism about behavioral patterns without falling back on "critiquing my hostility and misrepresentation is tone policing" but the nature of defensiveness means instead we get a spiral of percieved proportional response that gets misread as worse than it is, which then etc. until more people learn that you have to actually just suck it up and break the cycle, it's not gonna be broken by just posting to the void about it while tearing into someone.)

ya!
also i see a lot of vague posts that i think are
misinterpretations of other posts ive seen but might be true interpretations of posts i havent seen. its a total mindfuck. like i have no idea the range of how people were talking about wanting dark mode and so its hard to interpret whether the people being rly defensive as valid or overreacting and its hard to not care.

without good Search it also makes it hard to know if any given accusation of the behavior of the other side is like, true. I don't mean this case, this case was pretty mild, but a few previous ones were like... did they really do that? I can't find anything about it but I also can't rule it out. Unless the people being mean like. tag it. but mean people tend not to