idadeerz
@idadeerz

all i'm asking for is that people tag their posts or provide alt text or anything so that their posts are still accessible to me. this isn't hard.

tag your posts as #yingletspeak or #typing quirk, or provide alt text. cohost is not accessible for me when none of my friends bother to do this.


you can mute me if you don't like it!

but like... there's mutuals and friends engaging in it! i don't want to be barred from staying updated on my friends. i don't want to mute people i care about. this is not a good solution; it just centers yourself and not the needs of disabled people.

but it gives me species euphoria!

does that really have more priority than not hurting others, many of whom are disabled? i'm technically a therian too and there are many parts of the human experience that therians take for granted or even happily enjoy because they bring me convenience or because they help further the therian cause. wolves can't use computers, but without therians using computers we wouldn't even be here like this. sometimes this stuff is beneficial! and that's not a hard decision to make. so then why is changing a single letter around, tagging a post, or providing a copy without the typing quirk so much more difficult somehow?

you can install a browser addon!

why do disabled people have to fix the accessibility issues other people are intentionally causing. why do we get blocked when we ask simple questions about this stuff. like genuinely, i and several others just want this site to be usable and to not have to let go of our friends just to make it usable, and as a result of pointing this stuff out we just get blocked?? i thought this was supposed to be a space that was friendly for disabled people, where we could at least have a conversation about this and address issues like these.

i just get irrationally upset whenever i see yingletspeak now. on top of the fact that it is extremely difficult to read for me and it makes me sad that i have to put in so much extra effort just to stay updated on my friends. i don't want to get upset when i browse this website. ofcourse, being upset is my problem, and i have to solve that problem by filtering the content out so i don't get upset! by muting tags that contain the content!!

tags which nobody fucking bothers to use!!!!!!

so at this point i'd rather just stop using cohost entirely and i hate that. i really hate that. i love this platform but this is the only decent way i can solve this problem for myself because nobody is apparently kind enough to put in a little more effort to make it usable for everyone.


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in reply to @idadeerz's post:

like yeah yingletspeak or homestuck typing quirks aren't completely impossible to read, but i've already detailed that in my specific case it takes my brain so much extra effort to swap the z's for t's even if i already know what to swap them to. i'm not dyslexic but i still find it very hard to process those posts and i would rather not go through that when it's avoidable. for some people it's much worse than that too.

how is it not an accessibility problem? like... i'm not dyslexic, but i have autism + adhd and that results in the issue i mentioned regarding processing the typing quirk stuff. it is a complete mental slog to read. just because i can in theory read it if i put in extra effort doesn't make it accessible, it's difficult for me.

i'm sure people with visual impairment could use a screen and read text on it if they tried, but it's not accessible, which is why high contrast modes exist. i'm sure people with auditory processing issues (like i sometimes get because of my autism) could follow a conversation in a crowded place if they tried, but it's not accessible, which is why it's preferable to have spaces with good acoustics so that this doesn't get in the way. et cetera.

there's people who have much bigger disability issues with these posts than i do and if you think my accessibility issue doesn't count, that's fine i guess, but that doesn't mean i can't stick up for those who do have a much harder time with it.

The extra effort I wasn’t planning on extending while casually browsing social media (I often don’t realize a post is in yinglet for several words and then my OCD forces me to finish the post) has triggered multiple migraines for me. In the last month. It is ABSOLUTELY an accessibility problem, especially since YOU can choose to stop typing in yinglet but I cannot choose to make my brain work better and not be so prone to giving me migraines.

yingletspeak was a fun quirk for a while until i was told to sidestep it with an addon i'd never heard of. im not disabled in this area, it's just irritating to read, but getting that answer raised my eyebrows a bit lmao, i imagine a dyslexic person would have a nightmare scrolling through it all and placing the fix on their end's a bit uncaring.

we already do alt-text for images, why randomly stop here?

Here's the thing. If people are making informative posts they want others to see and engage with (like tutorials or info lists or any number of other things), those should be legibile and accessible for everyone, absolutely.

But someone's goofy personal posts, stream of consciousness, or inside jokes among friends aren't content that needs to be accessible to everyone. Sometimes a post or a person isn't for you, and that's okay! Yeah, it may suck if some of your friends are yinglets and you can't read their posts, but think of it this way:

If one of your friends was bilingual and posted in, say, German or French or Portuguese or [some other language you do not speak], would you expect them to tag those posts with #German every time so people who don't speak German don't have to see them lest they feel left out? They could use Google translate to get a rough idea of what the German post says, but that puts the burden on them to decipher the posts.

i feel like you're describing the issue with informative posts as a hypothetical, but some of the accounts i follow have absolutely been doing that. there's some yinglets who have switched to using yingletspeak outside of just yinglet shitposting. i get that the shitposting is just for fun, but that's not really the main issue here. there is informative content which is being made less accessible through it and which is also not being tagged accordingly.

also, i'm bilingual myself! i don't really post in dutch very often, but if i do, i do in fact always tag it; that's not out of accessibility, more just as a general tagging principle, because i would like to see other posts in the language get archived somewhere so everyone looking for dutch chosts/chosters can find them easily. i wouldn't really mind it if someone muted it if they don't speak the language. there's also #toki pona which... oh man, the first thing in there is a 107-post chain of someone posting words in the language. that's an issue entirely in its own right. but yeah, you get the idea here. that is not a language i or many people speak, but i think i've seen people using it before and they do tend to use tags like those.

i'm not sure if yingletspeak is comparable though, as it is content that is intended for english speakers. it's basically just a different version of english. bilingual posts aren't intended to be read by me in the first place. yingletspeak is, but it is intentionally more difficult to do so.

I guess what I'm getting at is, if you pretend the yinglets are speaking in another language, one you cannot read easily, maybe it will help lessen the frustration a little bit.

"Oh, I can't read this because it's in Yinglish, I'll just scroll past it."

It takes me several words of regular English to realize it’s yingletspeak, and then my OCD (which I don’t have the spoons to fight on something this small) makes me finish the post. And the effort to parse keeps giving me migraines. Why is asking for it to be tagged so I can filter it from my feed entirely such a big ask?

And there's also the broader fact that the way cohost works is if you're seeing so many untagged yinglet posts it means you follow a lot of people who do the yinglet typing quirk. I think this should be a discussion you have with your friends rather than the site as a whole.

Or I follow someone who reblogs yinglet posts no problem?? “Oh you just follow the wrong people dummy” some of my mutuals suddenly became infrequent yinglsetspeakers out of nowhere a month ago, am I supposed to silence their whole page because they might give me a migraine once a week? Why can’t they just tag???

I don't understand why you're so resistant to the idea of using a text swap plugin. Like, it seems like an ideal solution, to me. You'd get to read all the posts without problems, and all your friends would still get to feel nice by communicating in the way that's natural to them.

And like, I understand that you might be thinking "but I shouldn't have to", and sure, I guess. But like, I don't think it's fair for you to be upset about the way others speak? Especially when it's tied to their identity like that

it works!!!!!! thank u actually for the tip on a good Uscript extension, maybe i will look around for additional stuff like redirect reddit to old.reddit and breezewiki.

sad to report that safari extensions don't work on a PWA unless i'm missing something. maybe i'll try re-creating the shortcut now that the extension is applied.

thanks again Misty @dog !

i mean, yeah it's some of my yinglet friends/mutuals. but it's also other yinglet posts that they share from people who i don't know. and it's also such posts being shared by non-yinglets i follow. and even if my mutuals started tagging stuff, that fixes the accessibility issue for me but not the other users who struggle with this. i'd rather just ask everyone involved so there could be a more general solution.

I never thought of this particular intersection between typing quirks and accessibility issues before, thanks for pointing it out! I will try to be more aware of potential typing quirks in the posts i share and tag them accordingly, just in case some of my followers could benefit from it

i mean... see the other comment i left about that. i'm bilingual and i always tag stuff like that out of accessibility and archiving stuff in the language in question! forgot to mention it in the other comment but most websites have language features where you can filter out content in languages you don't speak; that's not even that uncommon.

however i still think this is different because yingletspeak is intended for English-speaking audiences already, it's just bastardized English. i don't think it makes sense to compare it to a foreign language, it's an intentionally difficult to read form of English.

Its so bizarre seeing people having a problem with tagging their fucking posts on cohost. ESPECIALLY as an accessibility thing. It only makes sense as ablest "how dare you tell me to accommodate you" behavior. Weirder still I've yet to see yingletposting without going out and looking for it, so the acting like they don't need to accommodate anyone else is so weird given that they're just not a large community by any means. "Put up or shut up" as a community attitude towards disability, in a community that small, is so strange to see. I really wonder why this flared up here specifically, yknow?