byte

frankly, this is about the best take on this angle of the longer-running situation that I can think of

accessibility is not, and should not be, the responsibility of individual users on a space full of user-created posts. tools for accessibility, both of the interface and for posting, are the responsibility of the writers of the users' clients

also if the purpose of a post is to say things casually between friends or random acquaintances, or to just toss a shitpost into the aether, whatever bit someone is doing is theirs to do (as long as they're not using flashing lights or other effects that are an active threat to others, to be clear). it is also the choice of anyone interacting with them, whether or not to respond to anything they post. if their reason for not responding is "I am having trouble understanding this post," that's good enough, and no-one should sensibly have much of an issue with that

I try to write alt-text for my images here whenever I can, even when it's for a shitpost. I don't really have a typing accent, to speak of. but I do type in a pattern that only capitalizes proper nouns, Things I Emphasize, and the word "I". and yet, it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone yells at me about this some day, especially if yelling seems to get them what they want... even though this "problem" can be solved with a few lines of JS, and the typing pattern is incredibly simple, and I've never seen anyone complain about it

it feels like people have massively twisted their expectations of how other people work. everyone is treated as if they're a billion-dollar megacorporation, rather than just someone random having fun on the internet

we could all do with just chilling the fuck out more

it doesn't feel very "both sides"y to me, since it actually commits to "and this is what that physically means"

and, yeah, i've only tested screen readers briefly so far but yinglet speech is Not something that has jumped out to me, compared to "how many times will it read out a username before i get to one line of text?"

and even then, something as simple as "somebody split their text over 6 lines" or "someone put multiple different (gasp) funny symbols in their username" was way more obtrusive than the funny typing style, and those are considered completely par for the norm

which just reminds me how nobody complaining about this, certainly none of the people that started it, actually use or even care about these things as anything more than a rhetorical tool. "won't someone think of the poor screenreaders" and their CSS crime is unimaginably harder to navigate, no thanks

(ofc some of the difficulties i've found are definitely just skill issues/infamiliarity with it, i'll figure that out at some point, but i don't think that takes away from the point here? shrug)

This discourse has been interesting to follow from the sidelines. I almost did a post complaining about yinglet speech a couple weeks ago but decided against it in favour of unfollowing a few cool people (you included, beeps :c) after noticing that muting tags didn't get me anywhere.
Seeing the broader response to this "discourse" makes me glad I didn't actually send that post cause that's a lot of pretty extreme hostility to something they could've easily just ignored.

I'm just patiently going to wait for the day where we can mute words from the posts themselves because honestly that seems like the best way to fix this issue without demanding everyone change how they interact with the funny eggbug site.