we live in a strange world where "talking" and "publishing" have become somewhat conflated, simply because having your words be public and globally accessible is the path of least resistance for asynchronous communication. if you want to say something to ten friends, you can either track them all down and gather their access controls on a single platform and create a group space, or just fire off a post somewhere and assume they all follow you. (or email them, i guess, but who does that?)
i suspect this is the core disconnect the cohost userbase keeps having with accessibility β the people who see all posting as a form of publishing think there are hard obligations on the publishers, whereas the people who see their posting as talking to their ten friends think complete strangers are walking up to them in a bar to go "hey i can't understand your conversation, that's ableist". to which a completely reasonable response would be: who the fuck are you?
the outspoken a11y crowd here, the "publishing" folks, seem to think that if they condemn others for failing to live up to their obligations in stronger and stronger language, eventually that will cause... something... to happen. but to the "talking" folks, who don't see those obligations in the first place, that can only sound more and more unhinged.
and i don't see a path to victory for the "publishing" folks. because those obligations just don't exist, and even if you think they ought to, you cannot will them into existence by immediately applying as much social pressure as you can muster. you just come across as a bully. at worst, you make accessibility seem like a nightmarish and toxic subject that should be given as wide a berth as possible, because now someone's first exposure to it is a stranger yelling at them to not have fun in their posts.
it's certainly nice if more posts use, for example, alt text. i don't think that means people are jackasses if they don't use alt text. they're not getting paid for this. they're just posting, for themselves. no one is required to accommodate strangers in their own personal space, and telling them they're ableist is highly unlikely to inspire them to open their arms wider. you cannot scold the world into being more compassionate.
i said before that "not everything can be for everyone" and a bunch of people got mad, but that doesn't make it any less true. there are people on here whose posts i find unbearable to read, so i don't read them. i don't get a lot of cultural references, which is not a disability, but i don't often have the attention budget for medium-length fiction, which is a disability, and personally the upshot is exactly identical in both cases: a post i end up scrolling past, with a vague sense that i missed out on something. i sometimes think about lexy's labyrinth and how i just do not know how to make a sokoban game comprehensible using only audio cues. (i also do not know how to make a sokoban game more playable for people who just aren't very good at sokoban.)
the original problem here isn't even that a handful people are typing as yinglets. the original problem is that one person doesn't want to mute the yinglets because they still want to read the yinglets' other posts, so they want the yinglets to do some extra work to save them from making an unsatisfying decision, and the yinglets don't want to. that's not a systemic accessibility issue so much as a mundane interpersonal one.
