#Cognitive Accessibility

[intervex]

What Pride Flags Mean, Part 1: Gender and Attraction

Welcome to the latest installment of my autistic hyperfixation on flags! I wanted to figure out a common language of Colour X means Thing Y. Like how pink is consistently used for feminine.

Having a common language for flag meanings matters because it improves cognitive accessibility of flags. ♿️💙

But I didn't want to be prescriptive about what colours should mean what. Just because I think Thing X should go with Colour Y doesn't mean everybody else would.

So this turned into a descriptive, empirical project. I gathered a data set of 2060 pride flag colour choices to figure out what are the most common colour-meaning combinations. Some of the results:

And here are the abstract modifiers: these are modifiers that were generally shared between the genders and the attractions. For example, black is used to indicate having no gender as well as having no attraction.

Click here for tables with okLCH values, hex values, definitions, and notes - I've put a more detailed write-up on my Wikimedia Commons userpage. (Mediawiki supports sortable tables and Tumblr does not.)

METHODS-AT-A-GLANCE

To make the figures above, I assembled a data set of pride flag colours. It contains 2060 colour choices from 624 pride flags, representing 1587 unique colours. Click here for a detailed description of how I gathered and tagged the pride flag colours and tagged them.

For each tag, I converted every colour to okLCH colour space and computed a median colour. OkLCH colour space is an alternative to RGB/hex and HSL/HSV. Unlike RGB/hex and HSL/HSV, okLCH is a perceptual colour space, meaning that it is actually based on human colour perception. 🌈

In okLCH space, a colour has three values:

- Lightness (0-100%): how light the colour is. 100% is pure white.

- Chroma (0-0.37+): how vibrant the colour is. 0 is monochromatic. 0.37 is currently the most vibrant things can get with current computer monitor technologies. But as computer monitor technologies improve to allow for even more vibrant colours, higher chroma values will be unlocked.

- Hue (0-360°): where on the colour wheel the colour goes - 0° is pink and 180° is teal, and colours are actually 180° opposite from their perceptual complements.

The important thing to know is that okLCH Hue is not the same Hue from HSV/HSL - the values are different! (HSL and HSV are a hot mess and do not align with human colour perception!)

You can learn more about okLCH through my little write up, which was heavily influenced by these helpful articles by Geoff Graham, Lea Verou, and Keith J Grant.

You can play with an okLCH colour picker and converter at oklch.com

🌈

MORE RESULTS: COLOUR DISTRIBUTIONS

Back when I started tagging my data, I divided my data into five main chunks: Gender qualities (e.g. masculine, androgynous), Attraction (e.g. platonic, sexual), Values (e.g. community, joy), Disability (e.g. Deaf, blind), and Other.

I'll talk about Disability and Values in future posts! But for an alternate view of the data, here are the full distributions of the colours that were placed in each tag.

They come in three parts: tags I created for Gender, tags for Attraction, and tags from Other. The abstract modifiers are spread between the first two, though their contents transcend Gender and Attraction.

Some distributions have a lot more variance within them than others. Generally speaking, major attraction types tended to have the least variance: sensual attraction is really consistently orange, platonic is really consistently yellow, etc.

Variance and size do not correlate. Many of the smaller tags are quite internally consistent. I don't have a ton of tags in "current gender" but they're all the same dark purple. Xenine/xenogender has a whole bunch of entries, and there's a really big spread from blue to yellow.

Some tags, like intersex as well as kink/fetish show there are a small number of different colours that are very consistently used. Whereas other tags like masculine show a very smooth range - in this case from cyan to purple.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with how things wound up! 🥳 It makes sense to me that an umbrella term like xenogender would have a lot of variance. What honestly makes me happiest is just how many tags wound up 180 or 90 degrees from their opposites/complements. 🤩

Not everything lined up nicely (the opposite of drag is .... neuroqueer? awkward.) 🤨 Some things lined up in hilarious ways, like how initially I had the opposite of kink/fetish being Christian (amazing.)

But as a whole, there's a lot of structure and logic to where things landed! I hope this makes sense for other people and can help inform both flag making as well as flag interpreting (e.g. writing alt-text for existing flags). 🌈

I'm hoping to post the Disability and Values analyses in the coming days! If you want to learn more, my detailed notes along with tables etc are over on my Wikimedia Commons userspace. 💜

Everything here is Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0, which means you're free to reuse and build on my visualizations, tables, etc. Enjoy!

[neurodiversitysci]

Found: A Blog Post About ADHD Readers, ADHD Writers, and Conflicting Access Needs

Why People With ADHD Write Such Long Posts (and Also Have Trouble Reading Them)

I'm pretty sure this blog post was inspired by Tumblr...

...Certainly, many people here should read it.

[schar-aac]

"cognitive accessibility"

image: a thought bubble over a ramp. the ramp is light brown and has an arrow pointing up it.

"cognitive inaccessibility"

image: a thought bubble trying to float up stairs. the stairs are light brown and have an arrow pointing up, stopped by a 'stop' or 'pause' symbol.

[variousqueerthings]

being trans in the UK right now is so very strange, you're able to go to a mainstream high-budget arts and/or science institution and find beautiful acknowledgements of your history and respectful inclusion of current lives and projects and politics that's based in well-researched community-minded testimony and statistics, but then the government and healthcare industry is all but openly admitting that they want you to disappear off the face of the earth, based largely on the ravings of one terminally online author, a few disgraced academics and comics, and their far-right antisemitic misogynist racist american evangelist friends on a site run by a billionaire megalomaniac. i go to some positive visibility celebrating bodily autonomy that makes it seem like we're moving forwards on the same day as the cass report is released and everything is on fire

[wheelie-sick]

"everyone can read theory! it's not that hard!!"

me: *on page 10 of the communist manifesto and already has 3 pages of notes trying to comprehend what the fuck this guy is saying* *has spent multiple hours reading the first 10 pages*

[randomly--accessed--memories]

Just a thought, but i feel like Vox being trans masc would have a lot of angst potential. Maybe Alastor made him wear a skirt at one point and Vox knew it was wrong but couldn't do anything about it cause Alastor gave it to him. idk.

That thought has crossed my mind, but since I'm not trans, I'm not comfortable delving into something like that– it can get fetishistic so easily and that's by no means something I want to do with any aspect of this AU.

[liminalweirdo]

source

[whimsimmortal]

Check it out, new Maddie mental "dissection" oneshot fic from your very own Whimsi dropped this morning,

[beazt]

ok I’ve put together a list of disability-focused books for me read while I have the Seattle library ebook card. I’m not sure what order I’m going to read them in, yet. and obviously this list is non exhaustive, it’s just what I could find & deem worth reading from a surface level glance at the blurbs right now, while I have a migraine. i fully intend to explore other topics and revisit other titles im unsure about/prioritizing lower, I have them tagged separately on Libby.

if anyone would like to join me on this journey— be it by reading/listening to the books yourself at your own pace or just following my own posts about what I read— I’m going to come up with a tag for this journey. suggestions for that are welcome, I just want it to be a near-unique tag because tumblr search is awful

(most of the titles I have selected for this list at least make a notable effort to be inclusive and intersectional, if you’re worried about that. however, I have not read any of these yet, I cannot confirm anything about their actual content. I guarantee there will be excerpts worth critique from books on this list. part of exploring these heavy social topics is critical thinking.)

my current list is as follows, in no particular order:

Fat Girls Hiking by Summer Michaud-Skug — I’m interested particularly in modifying hiking (and other outdoor activities) to be more accessible for myself, as I love hiking but find it very difficult nowadays, the book seems to be at least decently disability-informed

The Future Is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha — disability justice for a better future that emphasizes the value of disabled folks. overall interested to see the perspectives and rhetoric presented in this book, along with:

Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha — I don’t think I can do this one justice in a couple lines of tumblr text. read its blurb yourself, it includes: “a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind.”

My Body Is Not A Prayer Request by Amy Kenny — appeals to my experience living as disabled and intersex in a rural part of the Bible Belt in an evangelical household

Disability Pride by Ben Mattlin — gonna be honest, I threw this one in without reading its blurb. regardless of its quality, I believe I should read it based off title

Crip Kinship by Shayda Kafai — this book is based around an art activism project called Sins Invalid, exploring some of the messaging of it in a disability justice framework

Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew — from what I can gather, this book touches a lot on the social model of disability

Decarcerating Disability by Liat Ben-Moshe — prison abolition and decarceration with a disability focus

QDA by Raymond Luczak — QDA stands for queer disability anthology, also threw this one in based on the title

[waterlilyvalley]

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[lifesver]

i'm once again learning about wrestling moves and i have to laugh. y'all? fellas? why are you as a man trying to get behind another man and push him to the ground-

[lemonbubble]

video: it's the holiday season! me (<-southern hemisphere): well, this is true i guess, i am not feeling excluded from the target audience just yet video, 1 second later: [stock animated snow falling overlay] me: ah. there it goes.

[impossible-rat-babies]

people be like “14 jobs are so brain dead!” while having a plogin that reduces the number of buttons on a job

[kittoforos]

a lot of Posts floating around now about chatgpt in college, lxds. some things people are saying are true of course, but I work in at a large public university in the usa and I will set aside my cool laissez faire tech accelerationist cynicism to be totally honest for a moment:

the argument that ‘essay writing is a super specific skill that doesn’t matter in professional life so you should disregard those courses and just cheat to get the degree’ is very concerning to me, even as someone who doesn’t give a fuck about cheating per se, bc we don’t teach ‘essay writing’ in reading comprehension courses. or at least decent instructors don’t. I don’t. all that stuff about it being a cultural code is like, true above basic courses (so like, in grad school and even advanced undergrad courses yes it’s about *how* you write with all the attendant bullshit) but in that kind of remedial textual reasoning class in undergrad that’s required to get the basic ba degree, *nobody* writes in the prestige cultural style. the task in question is to be able to parse text and understand and construct logical arguments, and to be able to tell when an argument has something wrong with it, and to explain this clearly to other people. which you will need all the time forever in this hashtag society no matter what your job is, so you can tell when institutions are taking you for a ride. so like. …. :/

[ryssabrin]

it’s actually kinda funny that larian treats gale like the annoying guy no one likes but when you look at the fandom at large it’s? just not true? like some newer players will be a little annoyed at having to sacrifice magical items to him until they realize how many shit tier magical items there are in act 1 lol. and even on reddit all of the “who’s your least favorite companion” and “who did you hate at first but warmed up to” threads tend to have more lae’zel, shadowheart and astarion responses but hardly ever gale. he’s just immediately polite and charming. there’s even a running joke that he’s actually the “rizzard” of waterdeep for how many people end up wanting to romance him when they didn’t initially intend to.