hi i'm siz

Please read this article.

It's not what you're expecting. It's not a post about why alt text is important. It's not a post about how to write it well.

It's a post about access, and how access is seen by the people who feel they're providing access as a service, and whether or not that service is helpful or even welcome.

This post isn't meant to tell you whether you should use alt text. You should. Anything you write is better than having a screen reader say "image". "My cat" is more useful than image. Not leaving the box blank is always the right thing to do.

But I see a lot of discussions about accessibility that don't think about the broader subject, and this piece is vital to me to understanding that, as someone who is largely able bodied (I had only temporary visual impairments, so I've had screen reader experience but only in a temporary and basis), whose only real mental disability is ADHD which is nothing even coming close to something like being blind or deaf when interacting with the world.

I think it's important to get this person's message. For example when I see people fret over how to put alt text on their visual art, I keep thinking about the bit in this article about braille transcribed films, and how little this really means to the author and how little they care or are interested in this sad replacement for the experience of a film.

This isn't about alt text at the end of the day. But if we're going to have a big debate about alt text, like any other accessibility debate, I think the perspective here is so important. It absolutely will change the way you approach all accessibility. And it doesn't mean you will simply think it's no longer important, it absolutely is. But it will reframe how you approach it.

Sighted and hearing people have always had a hard time accepting that we are happy for them. Why have they never been happy for us? They wish only to be happy for themselves through us. Part of the fear many of them feel when encountering DeafBlind people comes from the way we naturally decline so much of what they cherish. They seek relief from this anxiety by insisting that we take in their world. Then they ask us a rhetorical question: “It’s great, isn’t it, this world of ours?” This is the awful function of access: to make others happy at our expense. Until Protactile plunged us into the churning currents of being, we didn’t know what we were giving up by consuming access. And the sighted and hearing didn’t know what they were missing out on by not entering our world.

this was a great article and it gave me much to think about, thank you for linking it

i never considered the use of "un/necessary" in the "sex scene discourse" rhetoric as a way to elide saying that the art always by definition "needs" all of its constituent parts, but that's totally what it is -- a "defense of the unnecessary" is already ceding ground to the rhetorical framework of the coddled/fascist mindset by assuming that things can like, be unnecessary within an artistic work. I think Brandon Taylor's writing here absolutely nails that and more. here are two of my favorite paragraphs:

Another defense of the unnecessary that crops up in writing advice forums and in threads and tweets (now posts), is that “you need an unnecessary scene where the characters are just hanging out to give the story room to breathe.” And I would argue that that is…not an unnecessary scene? That is a very necessary scene? It literally has a function? How can it be unnecessary if it has a function? I mean, truly, use your human mind. Words mean things. And you might say, oh, these people who say that mean that the scene is not important for plot reasons, that’s what necessary/unnecessary is about. And I would argue that a scene where the characters are hanging out is in fact also still directly related to the plot. because in the scene where the characters are hanging out, they are also, hopefully, if it is well written, processing what they have experienced up to that point. It’s not just a breather for the audience. Hopefully, the characters are processing—dealing or not dealing with what they’ve done and said and heard and had done to them. Hopefully, in your “rest scenes” there is actually quite a lot of plot happening, and hopefully, in those scenes, something is happening to make the next thing happen.

In a story, all things are related. What a character feels about what is happening is as much a part of what they do next as anything else. We only believe character action when it seems to come out of real human response to situation and circumstance. That’s why some plots appear more plausible to us and some appear implausible. You can make a set of implausible events feel likely and believable to a reader if the characters respond and behave in ways we might imagine ourselves behaving or someone behaving. This is how the fantastical and speculative fiction work. This is how fairy tales and fables work. Bears don’t talk. But if they did talk, they might behave in certain ways that are familiar to us. Wolves don’t go around dressing as grandmothers, but we do know that wily people will do anything to get what they want, including dress as a grandmother to trick a little girl alone in the woods. Pigs don’t build houses, but if they did build houses, we might imagine that they’d pick an assortment of materials that made sense to them depending on their personalities and quirks. But that is about plausibility, not necessity.

emphasis mine

Part of why I stopped using Twitter was because it was a hotbed of people turning every political issue into an excuse to make people ashamed of the thoughts and feelings they were having in the privacy of their own heads

I'm not sure if this is, like, neurologically how OCD works but I think there's some common thread there of "when the world feels out of control, your brain seizes on the things you can control."

So stuff like word choice and media consumption get magnified because at least they're within reach. I can at least theoretically get them right. (I can't really, but it doesn't seem impossible the way single-handedly ending fascism and climate change is impossible.) So if I dump all of my anxiety about the big things into the little things... oh. that's a lot of anxiety. i don't know if it will fit.

(this is not vagueposting about any current discourse or aimed at any specific story. I'm making up examples and not mentioning individual authors for a reason)

When assessing how successfully a subject is handled in fiction, whether the story approaches it literally or metaphorically is important. The creator is responsible for signaling this in some way; it'd be pretty disingenuous to write a straightforward heroic arc for a character depicted as an actual historical Nazi and then claim after the fact that it was a symbolic representation of some internal struggle, for example.

On the other end, everyone has seen the reviews/critiques that are like, "How Mystica Starlight Magical Adventures Fails to Grapple with the Real Horrors of War" as though abstraction is a fatal flaw and not a necessary tool when using recognizable conflict as a catalyst for characters' personal growth. It does actually trivialize real horrors to give them a protagonist, but stories transform the unfathomable into the personal. It is more respectful to draw clear lines between the play-pretend you are making up for your own entertainment and others' and things real people have suffered, even if your characters are experiencing realistic emotional fallout.