#but ok to rb

[hopefulqueer]

before pride month ends, anybody wanna admit they

don't have a crush on me please dear lord nobody ever have a crush on me ever again i am so aromantic PLEASE if u have a crush on me keep it to ur damn self

[allalrightagain]

[sitting in a silent room with the lights off] it is too loud and too bright in here

[shoreline-system]

listen man i have to be real with you. the constant need + expectation to keep pushing yourself as a disabled person is utterly exhausting and i don't think this is sustainable actually

[thrandilf]

I gotta get this outta my system in full or I Will explode so

Re RP and accessibility

It is 2023 and so it’s hard to. Feel like this is necessarily new info but I want to explain to people what makes Artsy text inaccessible and why people who need accessibility feel so rejected/angry about this

Any deviation from plain text is going to make things more difficult to read for somebody out there. Full stop. I had a friend without any kind of disability tell me they couldn’t read the UK edition of LotR because it doesn’t always use full quote marks and it’s jarring. Like if that is enough to make something not readable to someone please imagine paragraphs of prose written with some number of variations such as

Small text

Excessive bold/italics for aesthetic rather than actual emphasis

Sometimes even purposeful emphasis italics and bold are overdone so much that things are hard to read. If it looks like a typical American comic book with half of the words being bolded, it’s hard to process.

Extra spaces between words (especially a thing for screen readers)

Punctuation that’s extra big or small or otherwise nonstandard so it’s difficult to see or draws the eyes to it so much that it acts as a speed bump

Along the same lines, symbols embedded in text.

Bolding all dialogue. Granted- this might make things more accessible to some people and everyone is different, I admit some people might need this.

Differing text sizes within the same post

Writing in no caps is one that personally makes my head ache when it’s paragraphs of prose not because I am a stickler for “proper” English but it’s again hard to process

I’ve never seen someone RP in all caps but as above it would be hard to read if they did. Some fancy fonts do look like all caps

Icons (previously especially on mobile but now it isn’t so bad) are visual speed bumps and while I care more about the text itself and the content they can add to legibility problems/visual noise

More so on Twitter, but use of lots of different fonts even in the same sentence is probably the most difficult to read for anyone

I do not know if there’s more but generally some combination of these makes text inaccessible. It could be physical limitations like vision disabilities, being prone to eye strain, migraines (I personally can get migraines from reading a lot on screens and a lot of small text and the like can trigger them), or other conditions like dyslexia or ADHD/autism from my understanding, or anything else that may interfere with text comprehension

There’s a cultural expectation in some RP circles that people have to decorate their text to be taken seriously. So I get why even well meaning people who do care about accessibility may feel pressured into making things less accessible, or some people may not know

Said expectation, which is frankly pretentious and takes away from the actual content of posts, makes it actively harder for anyone who needs any kind of accommodation to participate in said social activity

It’s also unfair to everyone. Your writing, your content, your characterization should be celebrated and engaged with. I don’t want anyone to feel like your posts must be a certain aesthetic or else it’s not worth reading. That’s a toxic af norm

I want to emphasize that I understand some people are perfectly capable of reading small text and extra bold and fancy fonts and do not see how it’s an issue. I understand that creating said barriers to others may be inadvertent. But if someone says hey x is not legible to them, it is not legible. It’s not really up for debate.

A lot of times it feels like people who express that things are not accessible get debated with or told it isn’t that bad or whatever else to make said person feel like they are actually the problem for trying to raise a concern/be honest that hey. I Cannot read this. Like no lie/exaggeration. If someone says “I just can’t read/process xyz easily or in some cases at all” believe them.

It is not meant to be a culture war or to be shaming self expression or whatever else it comes across as, but when people get overly defensive about aesthetics over accessibility, it turns into something ugly. Which then makes said people who want readable text from their community in a social activity feel unwelcome and then people who do a lot of formatting feel attacked

I just want to clarify though my stance here is strong

It’s not about taste

It’s not about preference

It’s not meant to be a dunk on people’s artistic sides

It’s not pleasant to bring up to anyone

It’s not fun to feel like you’re about to ruin a relationship when you try to tell someone that you want to read their work and either can’t or it’s difficult and you’re used to getting hostility over it

I like bullet journaling. I like typography. I get why making text pretty is appealing. There’s a lot of room for visually stimulating text in hobbies

But when the rp community at large puts aesthetics over other people, and it’s normalized to not care about being accessible, it feels like a massive Fuck You.

It might not be on purpose. Like I sound mad but I get it maybe it isn’t on purpose

But this post is here to say that this is what it comes across as. And it’s hurtful and frustrating and people have left RP over it. It’s frustrating to feel like your ability to do a thing with people if they would just do something that in fact takes less effort on their part to do fo post things clearly rather than to put speed bumps in it is somehow not worth it

And ideally, rather than try and accommodate on a case by case basis remembering who can’t read small text or who can’t process lots of bold or whatever, the norm would change to be accessible from the start. And it feels like there’s just a lot of resistance to that ever happening

[virtualplushy]

ohhhh i get it now. the little seed of loneliness i’ve carried with me since i was five will never go away

[letmebegaytodd]

tragedy enjoyers when even good intentions lead to ruin

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[trinketbug]

"furry inflation" (2024)

[sidras-tak]

Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.

[traumatizeddfox]

“but it wasn’t that bad”

did it hurt? did you feel scared? unsafe? were you embarrassed? humiliated? terrified? did you feel confused on why? does it keep you up at night? do you avoid being in a similar situation? did you cry? did you want to cry? who told you it wasn’t that bad?

[vikingfunerals]

the commodification of friendship is the most annoying thing to come out of the internet in ages. like actually i love to break this to you but you're supposed to help your friends move even if it's hard work. or stay up with them when they're sad even if you're gonna lose sleep. you're supposed to listen to their fears and sorrows even if it means your own mind takes on a little bit of that weight. that's how you know that you care. they will drive you to the airport and then you will make them soup when they're sick. you're supposed to make small sacrifices for them and they are supposed to do that for you. and there's actually gonna be rough patches for both of you where the balance will be uneven and you will still be friends and it will not be unhealthy and they will not be abusive. life is not meant to be an endless prioritization of our own comfort if it was we would literally never get anywhere ever. jesus.

[possuminnit]

being in love with ur friend like entirely platonically is insane. like. hey, i love you so much by the way. i carry a part of you in me, so if were apart ill still do things that will remind me of you because i got it from you. hey man i know were talking right now but i miss you. i love you

[virtualplushy]

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

[alphacrone]

thinking about all the “small” art that’s ever existed. songs that were only ever sung in one village. stories written by children that got lost in the shuffle. personal paintings that didn’t survive the test of time. how they affected the lives of just a few, but still existed, still mattered to someone.

[bassiter2]

if you search gay bars on google it'll show you stuff just bc someone said the word gay in a review apparently

[ad-astra-per-aspera-1389]

damn... house has made me way more chill about medical stuff. I just found out my friend has to get open heart surgery, and my reaction was like "but... they know what's wrong and they're fixing it, right? and he's stable and everything?" And they said yes, so I was like "okay, cool. I mean, that sucks ass, obviously, but he's gonna okay, so I'm not too worried about it"

I guess I've just learned that the scariest part of someone you love being in the hospital is not knowing what's wrong (or knowing the thing is incurable). If they know what's wrong and how to fix it, then they'll do that, and it'll be okay.