#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.

[kunaiman]

Being a Cosmere fan is the most annoying thing in the world, because it completely overwrites your ability to call things fandom-specific terms. Like "Oh, those Emblems in Engage aren't ghosts or anything, they're Cognitive Shadows, representations of who they were in life." Or like "Of course the Metaverse exists, every planet has a Cognitive Realm." Or like "Yeah, obviously taking away a Visionbearer's Vision would make them less Connected to who they were before getting it, those have to overwrite your Spiritweb," or even "Yeah of course Fjorm taking the Rite of Frost would end up weakening her to death, that's Savantism right there."

Like yes, this makes it *very* fun to write fusionfic because with how detailed Investiture Science and Realmatic Theory is in the Cosmere it's almost trivial to fit any given fandom into the Cosmere (the only real issue is breaking that "Earth doesn't exist" rule, which is a given for any fusion fic), but it also makes conversing with fans of the media you're talking about but *not* the Cosmere very difficult, because you either have to pause every 5 minutes to describe a term, or you have to pause every 5 minutes to try to word things so you don't need to describe a term.

[itspileofgoodthings]

.

[fagulaa]

im a grown ass man and im coming up with wolf 359 ocs. dont look at me

[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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The DreamSpring’s built-in dispenser is rechargeable and lasts several uses between charges.

[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

[cavewolf]

this is such a bizarre thing to require. like yeah i had autism but it went away after a year lol

[rocketbirdie]

boy howdy i sure do love how every single grocery store in the city is rearranging all of their aisles! i love not being able to find any of the shit i'm looking for!!

[consider-your-potatoes-mashed]

Long ass post incoming:

Okay so generally speaking my university’s campus is relatively accessible on first glance and new buildings are in theory ADA compliant and they’re working on the older buildings which is more than can be said for a lot of campuses or even places in general. A lot (but not all) of the professors are respectful of accommodations and do their best to accommodate all students as best as they can however there is still a lot they could do but either don’t know they can or outright refuse to do.

However, it is still very inaccessible!

Elevators frequently break and can take days or weeks to be fixed they’re also really annoying and often hard to find because they’re not labeled very well not to mention they’re slow as fuck, ramps are slightly too steep (super hilly campus too), shuttles are available but frequently run late or are excessively full and only run to a certain time so if you need to get somewhere on our giant campus past a certain time you’re fucked, sure there’s mobility services you can access but you need to schedule pickups ahead of time so you can’t really do anything spontaneously and there’s not many of them so if you need it the same time as someone else you’re fucked, so many doors that are supposedly automatic are broken, a building may have an automatic entrance but if you need to get into a classroom or lecture hall the doors are wickedly heavy, some lecture halls have auto doors at the top of the hall but not at the bottom where someone with a wheelchair could actually get into the room, and that’s just to name some of the accommodations for physical mobility impacting disabilities.

When it comes to other disabilities the campus and specifically lectures can be inaccessible too. For example some professors refuse to use their microphones in large lecture halls because they feel their voice is “loud enough” but that makes it even harder for students who have hearing impairments or auditory processing issues, often times professors use many colors on their lecture slideshows and that can make it difficult for students with colorblind ness or students with other visual impairments or for students with visual processing problems, when COVID-19 was still deemed to be a thing worth worrying about lectures were “podcasted” or recorded in classroom or on zoom so that they could be accessed remotely but now many professors refuse to record their lectures because they cannot be bothered to just push a simple button which leaves students who can’t safely come to campus unable to access their education or students who are sick without that same access and students who even if they can make it to lecture cannot process everything in it for a whole lot of other reasons unable to access their education the ability to do this when Covid was still of public concern (1) just shows that we can still do it and honestly still should(2), additionally many lecture halls are full of distractions and noises and so much else that make them inaccessible to people with cognitive/mental disabilities and mental illnesses, and that’s not just the case lecture halls but also in dining halls and gyms and even just outside can be extremely overwhelming and overstimulating for many many people.

(1) which mind you it still should be we are still suffering as a society from a virus that is incredibly deadly and saying that it only kills those with underlying conditions and what not is ableist as fuck

(2)For example we don’t really turn in printed out copies of essays or assignments for hand grading anymore we turn them in online because that’s easier and with technology the way classes are run has changed so why hasn’t it changed with COVID??

In general I am thankful that the campus is relatively “accessible” but it still needs hella work. Sure not everyone can be accommodated completely by an institution or even by other people but there certainly are things that are very easy changes that can be made and there is stuff that we can do to accommodate ourselves and we cannot put the burden of accommodation solely on others we know ourselves the best and thus can figure out what accommodations we need from ourselves and others.

Overall the world is super inaccessible and we NEED to do better than we are doing now both abled and disabled people alike need to work together to make everything a better more accessible for as many people as possible

TL:DR

University campuses are super inaccessible to all disabilities and there is so much that needs to change and that can easily be done and it’s absurd that we aren’t doing it. Colleges and universities and professors and even students need to do better so that everyone can feel welcome and accommodated and safe to learn

[greypistacchio]

dear confused mutuals and tumblrinas,

the meme is funny because the ramen brick looks like Justin Timberlake's hair back when he released the video for "It's Gonna Be Me" (see GIF above). the song is (in)famous for the way he pronounces "me", which makes it easy to mistake it for "may", which completes the original rhyme:

roses are red

april is grey

but in a few weeks

it's gonna be may