i feel a wisp of a thing happening that's like
- accessibility is good
- the internet is only accessible if every single person on it puts some extra effort into stuff they post
- therefore, anyone who doesn't do that... is bad
which feels similar to what happened to "problematic", i guess? where it shifted from "hey don't absorb every facet of this corporate media completely uncritically", to like, a thing that's said about human beings. not even public figures, just, someone who draws art who you don't like
i feel like leftist communities have a real problem with turning every form of "this would be nice" into a yardstick of moral worth. and it turns out yardsticks are great for swatting people with
meanwhile i don't know if anyone really has any idea what they're doing here anyway. i don't know what it's like to be blind. i don't think i know anyone who's blind. i think out of 30k twitter followers i had two i knew to... have very poor vision, i guess, but i'm not even sure about specifics, and now i don't remember who they were.
i think alt text is good and i have been thinking about alt text since before some of you were even allowed online, but i still don't even know what good alt text is. is it helpful to have a screenreader say "drawing of a fox" to you? does that convey anything? would you feel fulfilled if i DMed you to say "hey i drew a fox" and that was all, and i didn't show you the picture? would you look down on me if i decided not to give you that experience?
i try to imagine myself in the position of experiencing images only through audio descriptions, and my main inkling is that unless the alt text is some breathtaking prose (or the image is a comic with a joke that's funny on its own or something), it might as well say "art you can't see". like surely i might as well just skip to the next post.
sometimes i think about how people on twitter liked to have a good time 𝕥𝕪𝕡𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕚𝕟 𝕕𝕠𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕖-𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕔𝕜 𝕠𝕣 𝕨𝕙𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣, until there was a big uprising about it, because screenreaders can't handle it. allegedly they read out the entire unicode name of each character in a row, and these are all named a mouthful like "mathematical double-struck small t".
but that's fucking ridiculous. even if you used these characters as intended, in math, the result would be horrendous. consider:
𝑓(𝑥) = 𝑎𝑥² + 𝑏𝑥 + 𝑐
my understanding is that this would be read as — are you ready? —
mathematical italic small f open parenthesis mathematical italic small x close parenthesis equals mathematical italic small a mathematical italic small x superscript two plus mathematical italic small b mathematical italic small x plus mathematical italic small c
how is that useful?
but there was never any uprising against the developers of screenreader software — which is largely a paid product — to just make this fucking work. instead the clear demand was for everyone — everyone — everyone — everyone — the entire human race to:
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understand the insane and unpredictable quirks of screenreader software, which they have never and most likely will never use themselves, and also could not use the way most of its actual userbase does without considerable practice
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work around those quirks every time they post anything publicly online, and thus
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not do funny things with unicode
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or they are bad people
"screenreader software" is deployed the same way "the bogeyman" is to children. i don't even know what "screenreader software" means. aren't there two major such things for windows? jaws and, idk, the other one? presumably mac has something totally different, and i know there's at least one open source one for linux. do they all have the same quirks? can people switch? i don't know. does anyone know? it feels like i'm being told secret video game tricks on the playground, but for video games that i don't own and neither does the other kid. hardly anyone involved in the conversation has direct experience but somehow it turns into lectures.
this isn't reasonable. this isn't sustainable. i don't know what is.
sometimes i also think about the time i went to japan for two weeks. my japanese is extremely limited, but as a way of forcing myself to keep it in cache while i was there, i tweeted only in japanese while i was there.
by which i mean
毎ツイートが日本語にだけ書いた
and some guy complained because he couldn't read my tweets.
but not everything is for everyone. not everything can be for everyone. writing "photo of my cat" doesn't mean they can suddenly see the photo of my cat.
I mean I'm gonna be the asshole here: I just ignore that shit and I recommend everyone else should too. I add alt text to my images mostly but like I've done production accessibility work on eg live captioning for events and screen reader support and half the things abled people who are looking for cookies complain about isn't real. Screen readers, for instance, actually work okay. JAWS has proper Unicode support and has for a while.
I actually just paused writing this post for a solid hour to test out orca which I didn't previously have installed on my desktop. I didn't really expect it to work as well as JAWS but god damn it was easier to get set up.
Turns out it works fine too! Reads "𝔹𝕒𝕕" as just "bad" courtesy of speech-dispatcher and espeak! Reads 𝑓(𝑥) = 𝑎𝑥² + 𝑏𝑥 + 𝑐 "f left paren x right paren equals a x superscript 2 plus b x plus c" which is super reasonable (it gets hairy when dealing with complicated integrals). The much-reviled Cohost login page works fine:
Image. Log In, heading level one. E dash mail address, entry. Password, password text. Log in, push button. Forgot your password, link. Back, unvisited link.
There are improvements that could be made here ("entry" and "push button" are generic descriptions; JAWS isn't better here so it's not just Orca), but it's not inaccessible, not by the standards of any UX lab I've ever worked in or run!
And like, I get it, these are things people need to get along in the world and that's important but it gets fucking obnoxious and insulting when people like me and my friends and comrades are used as bludgeons. When "CSS crimes make me sad cause I don't know web technologies so I can't do them myself" didn't get any traction, suddenly it was "oh, they're inaccessible"; I've joked about people using the same justification to insist artists stop drawing but I'm sure there's shitheads out there just fucking waiting. And so it goes. Don't use fun unicode because I don't know how to do it it's inaccessible (or reportedly was, in 2018 at the latest!) "I need a better dark mode because I get cluster headaches!" I get cluster headaches too, have had a diagnosis for years, and the incremental light emitted from light vs dark screen areas is minimal, not to mention that if you go back twenty years the same people were complaining about dark web pages inciting headaches and that you should always use light backgrounds! It's a major reason why searing white is the standard background color instead of medium grey now!!. Turn down your monitor brightness!
When the demand is that other people should make themselves smaller, not even so people have the things they need to get along but just to make people smaller or perform to you, nah. Get fucked.
