#i hate how pervasive and easy ableism is

[5283]

kpop stans really think "delulu" is...... just kpop slang? 💀

there were way more similar answers to bm's question, i just picked out the first two. the rest were variations of "delulu pills" memes 😶

i'm not on the schizophrenic spectrum myself but i experience a similar set of ableism daily so i can't just keep quiet about this.

i'm also aware it's not every kpop stan and that twitter is a spawn place for those teens who are trained to believe that performing being politically correct as not to get "cancelled" is the way nowadays. i'm talking about the phenomenon of "being an ally" by putting pronouns in their bios and thinking it's all there is to being an ally for lgtbqi+ people and other similar examples. it's not exclusive only to twt though but it's not like i take screenshots everywhere i go because it's really just exhausting talking about this.

i don't care if you're an impressionable teen, using specific symptom-related terms of stigmatized conditions to talk about anything but actual said symptoms will always be simply disgusting and ableist behavior.

delusional is a word used to describe a specific experience people on the schizophrenic spectrum experience. people that don't experience delusions shouldn't use this word to name other things that are not related to a particular everyday experience of schizo-spec people. delusions are debilitating and are a part of what makes a person disabled. using the word devoid of its original meaning only further stigmatizes schizophrenic people + people with related conditions who also experience delusions. because it normalizes only the word describing a symptom without normalizing the symptom itself since all of you keep using it in wrong context by erasing the initial meaning behind the word. the word you were searching for was a belief, not a delusion.

other examples since you're in need of more varied vocabulary to say the most usual things: far-fetched dreams, illusion, parasocial, desperate, naive etc.

[inside-aut-blog]

Through the Learning Glass: Worldshaper

When you get right down to it, education’s really a pair of glasses. Not just any old pair, mind—your first pair. The ones you peer through when you first realize, my god, you can see the leaves on that tree, and, perhaps more importantly, when it hits you that everyone else has always been able to see them.

They press into the bridge of your nose as you stare, mentally recalibrating, because suddenly the world seems clearer in more ways than one—transformed, even. That feeling, green blur shifting to leaves, that recalibration, that sudden clarity where there was none—that’s the core of learning, the true value.

So educational experiences are glasses.

And each one is your very first pair, conceptually speaking. Each one is a lens, as it were, through which to view the world writ large; each grants you awareness of new details and concepts; and each serves as a catalyst for insights which bring more nuanced and clear understandings of the world, your community within it, and yourself.

After reading extensively about autism from autistic perspectives, for example, I found myself noticing autism-related things everywhere—among them, the prevalence of functioning labels in allistic, or non-autistic, discussions about autistic people. I’d been aware of the trend before, but with my blurry view had seen nothing wrong with it. After researching and strapping on my “autism glasses,” however, it became crystal clear, and I began to form connections between research and reality. The connection, in this case, allowed me to see that functioning labels are both inaccurate—autism is like a circular color spectrum, not a linear gradient from “tragic thing” to “basically normal”—and disrespectful—they are often used to dismiss autistic people’s voices on the grounds that they are either too low- or high-functioning to have an opinion.

On a broader level, I formed a connection between this inaccurate disrespect and the concept of ableism—and began to see, in this and many other ways, how ingrained it is in our society. I also came to understand that my previous perception of both it and disability had been fundamentally flawed—blurrier than a park in a snowstorm at ninety miles an hour—though it now seemed clear as day, my world transformed and its pervasive inequality laid at my feet.

In short, I developed a clearer, more nuanced understanding of both disability and its relation to society, and so my worldview shifted—explicitly because my increased awareness of recently-amassed facts caused me to see related concepts everywhere and interpret those with said facts in mind.

In this way, education gives people new frameworks which better enable them to understand the world around them by spotting patterns related to the education-subject and analyzing them on both narrow and broad conceptual levels.

Education doesn’t limit itself to only the world writ large, though; the frameworks it gives us are as applicable narrowly as they are widely, and can be used on smaller scales, to make further connections within, for example, one’s own community. These connections can be—and indeed often are—the same as the societal discoveries, but in miniature. When I looked at my personal community through my autism glasses, for example, I discovered ableism in places I’d never expected: my sister using the aforementioned functioning labels, my mother claiming that “everyone is a little autistic,” and my doctor supporting hate-group-disguised-as-charity Autism Speaks. Critical framework application revealed that each of these examples mapped onto ableist ideas in larger society; in this way, education enables one to see connections not only between what they have learned and their communities, but between said communities and the world.

Yet the new connections formed on this level need not be related to such overarching themes; they can occur on entirely new tracks, and are just as often based in individual details. Such was the case when I looked at other individuals through my autism glasses: I recognized echolalia in my younger sister—that being a fancy word for repeating things you’ve heard others say as a means of communicating, and often easier for autistics than creating novel sentences. Before I recognized it, I often found myself somewhat unsure how to figure out what my sister wanted. Afterward, though, it was easy to see that I just needed to take a more active role in the conversation, both to understand her and to give her new words to echo. In this way, I made a connection not only between the information I’d read about autism and my own autistic sibling, but between her experiences and my actions—specifically, the ways my actions could affect her experiences.

Thus, education as a framework enables people to form more nuanced understandings not only of the other people in their communities and said people’s relationships to the framework-subject, but also their own relationships to their communities and the ways in which they can interact with them.

This holds true regardless of the subject matter, because human nature demands that we apply new information to old, to compare and contrast, and above all to do so with the things which matter most to us.

Relatedly, and perhaps most importantly, the various frameworks education provides us with can be—and often are, consciously or otherwise—applied to ourselves. This is due to the aforementioned human tendency to personalize everything and interpret information through the doubled-up lenses of the framework in question plus our own experiences. Such application often results in new insights into ourselves, on a variety of levels ranging from minor to overwhelmingly significant.

For instance, while researching autism, I found myself applying the framework to my own life. In doing so, I discovered that autistic experiences—and indeed the official diagnostic criteria—mapped easily onto my own life, habits, and personality; among many other things, I discovered that I use echolalia like my sister, just in a more delayed fashion; that I favor repetition in all aspects of life; and that my social skills are learned. I discovered, in short, that I am autistic.

This discovery completely altered my self-perception and sense of identity as I went from a fuzzy sense that I was weird and somehow broken to the crisp realization that I am disabled, certainly, but need no fixing—am merely different, not less, as per the disability theory aspect of the framework. And so, as a direct result of my research, my sense of identity shifted utterly and for the better—perhaps in a more dramatic fashion than that of the average educational experience, but nonetheless in a manner exemplary of education’s potential to alter our understandings of ourselves.

This potential, it must be stressed, holds true even in more rigidly academic settings, as seen when history students grasp parallels between their own actions in the present day and others’ from decades past.

Education in all its forms and degrees of personal intensity, then, encourages us to examine ourselves as well as our various surroundings, resulting in insights which allow increased clarity, nuance, and connection to new concepts in our self-perception.

Said insights don’t end there, however—they often extend beyond ourselves and back to other perceptual shifts, to encompass our understandings of ourselves in relation to our communities and broader society.

For example, after I discovered that I am autistic, I proceeded to reexamine my interactions with others in this context. This reexamination revealed that my communication style is more different from most people’s than I’d realized, given my repetitive speech and difficulty saying what I mean; in this way, the educative framework allowed me to more accurately view myself in relation to others—and to accept this view as per the aforementioned disability framework. This combined realization and acceptance enabled me to discover how to better express myself in ways that are comfortable to me and understandable to others.

Thus education can influence interactions with one’s community, not just understanding of it and oneself. Likewise it can influence interactions with one’s world writ large by better illuminating one’s place within it—in my case, allowing myself to be visibly autistic in defiance of a primarily ableist society, but in other cases, of course, different interactions and roles.

In this way, education functions as a framework for understanding not just the world and not just ourselves, but our roles within it and the ways in which we interact with it.

Thus, in myriad ways, education serves as a framework, a positioner, and a pair of glasses to hold up to each subcategory of our personal universes and to the relationships between them, the better to understand them and their intricacies in ways we previously had not considered.

Education clarifies, it illuminates, it diversifies, and it does so with attention to the smallest detail, bringing our experience of life into a newer, sharper focus. And with every educational experience we have, we gain another framework, another pair of glasses, which we can consider separately or together, swapping frames and stacking them, continuously, to gain ever-more-nuanced understandings of our worlds and our lives and how they might relate.

This understanding, this nuance, this continual growth—it is, above all, why we should learn, why we must learn—because there is always more of it to be found, and it comprises, in essence, the true value of education: it is the eternal worldshaper.

[neurowonderful]

ASAN Vancouver’s 2017 Disability Day of Mourning Vigil Address

[Image: A single candle. Its golden flame illuminates the total dark.]

Hello, friends and allies. My name is Amythest. I am autistic, and I am disabled.

We live in a world where, wrongly, some lives are considered to be worth less than others.

Where disability is so synonymous with tragedy that people say and mean things like, “If I became paralyzed I would kill myself,” or,

“I don’t think life would be worth living if I couldn’t see,” or,

"If you know your baby is going to be disabled, the only humane thing to do is make sure they aren’t born in the first place."

We live in a world where wheelchair users are approached and told that they are inspirations, simply for being outside of their homes or attending to their jobs or grocery shopping like everyone else.

Where visibly disabled people are openly told, “I don’t know how you do it, I would not be able to do it." As if our lives are so bleak that the average abled person cannot fathom why we have not yet committed suicide.

We live in a world where disabled people with cognitive and developmental disabilities are spoken down to, patronized, and treated like children — or worse. Regarded as incapable of thought or motivation, denied even the opportunity to try to communicate.

Where disabled people are institutionalized, segregated, stripped of our autonomy and right to choose for ourselves. Where disabled children and adults alike are abused and traumatized, all in the name of “treatment”.

Where disabled people are routinely denied equal opportunities for education and employment, medical care and organ transplants, the right to adopt or to raise their own biological children, the right to autonomy and self-direction, and equal protection under the law.

This is ableism. It is a most insidious enemy. In our society its reach is all-encompassing. Our medical establishments, our educational systems, every department of our government- all of it is informed by prejudice against and ignorance regarding people with disabilities. The pillars of our country have been built on a foundation of ableism.

Ableism is present in our sociological framework and in the day-to-day beliefs, values, and actions of the average Canadian citizen. And it must be questioned, countered, and smashed at every opportunity.

While an abstract idea to the abled majority, to the disabled community, ableism is a very real oppression. It is something we know intimately and something we struggle against every day. And it is this culture of ableism— this pervasive, ongoing devaluing of disabled lives— that has led us to this point.

In the past five years, over four hundred people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents or caregivers. Those are just the ones that we know about. In North America alone, almost eighty lives have been lost to the violence of ableism.

These are not isolated incidents, separate and unconnected. The truth is that there is a deep, ingrained prejudice in our society that asserts that a disabled life is not worth living. The worst lie of all is that to be disabled is to be worse than dead.

And so when one of our own is murdered, little attention is given to the victim of these horrific crimes. Media coverage and public discourse surrounding these killings overwhelmingly supports and even defends the actions of the murderer, calling these killings “understandable”, “inevitable”, or even, “merciful”.

The murders of three disabled Canadians were publicly reported in 2016. Cynara Ali. Melissa Couture. Ronald McCabe.

Cynara Ali's death was not understandable. Her mother, Cindy, killed her by suffocation, and then lied and claimed that a stranger killed Cynara during a home invasion.

Melissa Couture's death was not inevitable. She was developmentally disabled, like me. She was chronically ill, like me. She needed care and medical attention. Her mother, Patricia, killed her through neglect.

Ronald McCade's death was not merciful. Despite what the erasure of his obituary would have you believe, he did not "pass away after a long illness". His son, Adam, took a gun to the long-term care home where Ronald lived and killed him.

The most utilized quotation in all of the articles I read about Melissa's death came from a neighbour of 30 years. Of Melissa's mother, he said,

"Pat spent her whole life taking care of Melissa," and,

"You know when you get so exhausted from looking after somebody like that for so long, maybe something happened," and,

"I don’t know a more dedicated mother than Pat was to Melissa."

Of Melissa, he said much less.

" ... but Melissa was just, she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t hear, she was mentally challenged."

And that was it. This person was the Couture's neighbour for thirty years, which means that he knew Melissa for most of her short life. Of Melissa, the person who was killed by neglect, we know of this one sentence fragment.

And that sentence fragment speaks nothing of the loss of her life, or of her as a person. He highlights Melissa's impairments. He makes her out to be a burden. He rationalizes. He quietly condones the murder, blaming Melissa for her own death.

This is vastly different from the reaction when a non-disabled person is murdered by their parent. The media's tactic of focusing on everyone but the disabled victim is irresponsible journalism. This kind of reporting stokes the flames of prejudice and it is disabled people that get burned.

Further demonstrating how these murders are sanctioned by society is the fact that parents who murder their disabled children are much less likely to be charged at all.

If they are charged, their sentences are consistently shorter or less severe than the sentences received by parents who murder their non-disabled children. Some never see any jail time at all. This directly leads to more murders of disabled people.

This is the greatest injustice. This is where the devaluing of disabled life has brought us. Because our society’s understanding of what it means to be disabled is informed by the prejudiced opinions of the abled majority, it is easy.

It is easy to objectify and dehumanize disabled lives. And we become exactly that—objects of pity, burdens on our families, less than human.

If we want to stop this horrifying trend, we must resist. We must educate. And non-disabled people must listen to us. It is critical that society shift towards a person-centred view and understanding of disability. Listening to disabled people is the only way to do that.

Because if people would stop, and they would listen to us, they would hear what we are saying.

That our lives are worth living. That our lives are valuable. That we want to live.

They would hear our voices saying, see our hands signing, feel our hearts aching for justice.

And my hope is that then, our society would stop seeing us as a collection of impairments. That they wouldn't think of us as scary statistics, as a disease or epidemic, or as shameful deviations from the norm. That everyone could see us as individuals, wholly human and deserving of the same rights and personhood as everyone else.

And there is hope.

Patricia Couture was originally charged with failure to provide the necessaries of life for Melissa, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Her charge was upgraded to criminal negligence causing death.

Cindy Ali was charged with the first-degree murder of Cynara and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Adam McCabe was only charged with second-degree murder, which is defined as a murder that was not premeditated. I do not know how one could prepare a weapon, get in a vehicle, and drive to your father's secure long-term care home to kill him without meditating on it beforehand. There is much I don’t understand.

But there is hope. Hope for those still here and for those yet to come. And for those who have been taken from us: We will remember you. We won't let you be forgotten.

It is ignorance that leads to fear and hate. It is education that is the cure for ignorance. As an autistic person, that’s the only cure I want. It is my greatest desire that the disabled community and our allies can move the conversation away from negativity, hate, and fear, and towards acceptance, love, and equality. 

It is my dream, and the dream of so many other disabled advocates and activists, that one day we will live in a world where disabled lives are understood to be worth just as much as non-disabled lives, and that reality will reflect that understanding. 

I believe in a world where the murder of disabled people is seen as injustice, not our lives. Where our loss is the tragedy, not our presence. Our work is creating this reality. 

I believe in a world in which disabled people are leading the conversation about disability, and in which abled people are listening and our allies are lifting us up. We have already come so far. 

I believe that we can make a safer, fairer world for the next generation of disabled children because I can see what we have accomplished. We just have to keep going. 

And I know that if the disabled community keeps faith and works together, we can amplify our voices and drown out the lies. That even in the face of such adversity, such violence, such hate, together we can make the whole world hear what we have to say. 

There is hope. 

Thank you.

[suzanneshannon]

What the web still is

Being a pessimist is an easy thing to fall back on, and I’m trying to be better about it. As we close the year out, I thought it would be a good exercise to take stock of the state of the web and count our blessings.

Versatile

We don't use the internet to do just one thing. With more than two decades of globally interconnected computers, the web allows us to use it for all manner of activity.

This includes platforms, processes, and products that existed before the web came into being, and also previously unimagined concepts and behaviors. Thanks to the web, we can all order takeout the same way we can all watch two women repair a space station in realtime.

Decentralized

There is still no one single arbiter you need to petition to sign off on the validity of your idea, or one accepted path for going about to make it happen. Any website can link out to, or be linked to, without having to pay a tax or file pre-approval paperwork.

While we have seen a consolidation of the services needed to run more sophisticated web apps, you can still put your ideas out for the entire world to see with nothing more than a static HTML page. This fact was, and still is, historically unprecedented.

Resilient

The internet has been called the most hostile environment to develop for. Someone who works on the web has to consider multiple browsers, the operating systems they are installed on, and all the popular release versions of both. They also need to consider screen size and quality, variable network conditions, different form factors and input modes, third party scripts, etc. This is to say nothing about serving an unknown amount of unknown users, each with their own thoughts, feelings, goals, abilities, motivations, proficiencies, and device modifications.

If you do it right, you can build a website or a web app so that it can survive a lot of damage before it is rendered completely inoperable. Frankly, the fact that the web works at all is nothing short of miraculous.

The failsafes, guardrails, redundancies, and other considerations built into the platform from the packet level on up allow this to happen. Honoring them honors the thought, care, and planning that went into the web's foundational principles.

Responsive

Most websites now make use of media queries to ensure their content reads and works well across a staggeringly large amount of devices. This efficient technology choice is fault-tolerant, has a low barrier of entry, and neatly side-steps the myriad problems you get with approaches such as device-sniffing and/or conditionally serving massive piles of JavaScript.

Responsive Design was, and still is revolutionary. It was the right answer, at the right place and time. It elegantly handled the compounding problem of viewport fragmentation as the web transformed from something new and novel into something that is woven into our everyday lives.

Adaptable

In addition to being responsive, the web works across a huge range of form factors, device capabilities, and specialized browsing modes. The post you are currently reading can show up on a laptop, a phone, a Kindle, a TV, a gas station pump, a video game console, a refrigerator, a car, a billboard, an oscilloscope—heck, even a space shuttle (if you’re reading this from space, please, please, please let me know).

It will work with a reading mode that helps a person focus, dark and high contrast modes that will help a person see, and any number of specialized browser extensions that help people get what they need. I have a friend who inverts her entire display to help prevent triggering migraines, and the web just rolls with it. How great is that?

Web content can be read, translated, spoken aloud, copied, clipped, piped into your terminal, forked, remixed, scraped by a robot, output as Braille, and even played as music. You can increase the size of its text, change its font and color, and block parts you don't want to deal with—all in the service of making it easier for you to consume. That is revolutionary when compared to the media that came before it.

Furthermore, thanks to things like Progressive Web Apps and Web Platform Features, the web now blends seamlessly into desktops and home screens. These features allow web content to behave like traditional apps and are treated as first-class citizens by the operating systems that support them. You don’t even necessarily need to be online for them to work!

Accessible

The current landscape of accessibility compliance is a depressing state of affairs. WebAIM’s Million report, and subsequent update, highlights this with a sobering level of detail.

Out of the top one million websites sampled, ~98% of home pages had programmatically detectable Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors. This represents a complete, categorical failure of our industry on every conceivable level, from developers and designers, to framework maintainers, all the way up to those who help steer the future of the platform.

And yet.

In that last stubborn two percent lives a promise of the web. Web accessibility—the ability for someone to use a website or web app regardless of their ability or circumstance—grants autonomy. It represents a rare space where a disabled individual may operate free from the immense amount of bias, misunderstanding, and outright hate that is pervasive throughout much of society. This autonomy represents not only freedom for social activities but also employment opportunities for a population that is routinely discriminated against.

There is a ton of work to do, and we do not have the luxury of defeatism. I’m actually optimistic about digital accessibility’s future. Things like Inclusive Design have shifted the conversation away from remediation into a more holistic, proactive approach to product design.

Accessibility, long viewed as an unglamorous topic, has started to appear as a mainstream, top-level theme in conference and workshop circuits, as well as popular industry blogs. Sophisticated automated accessibility checkers can help prevent you from shipping inaccessible code. Design systems are helping to normalize the practice at scale. And most importantly, accessibility practitioners are speaking openly about ableism.

Inexpensive

While the average size of a website continues to rise, the fact remains that you can achieve an incredible amount of functionality with a small amount of code. That’s an important thing to keep in mind.

It has never been more affordable to use the web. In the United States, you can buy an internet-ready smartphone for ~$40. Emerging markets are adopting feature phones such as the JioPhone (~$15 USD) at an incredible rate. This means that access to the world’s information is available to more people—people who traditionally may have never been able to have such a privilege.

Think about it: owning a desktop computer represented having enough steady income to be able to support permanent housing, as well as consistent power and phone service. This created an implicit barrier to entry during the web’s infancy.

The weakening of this barrier opens up unimaginable amounts of opportunity, and is an excellent reminder that the web really is for everyone. With that in mind, it remains vital to keep our payload sizes down. What might be a reflexive CMD + R for you might be an entire week’s worth of data for someone else.

Diverse

There are more browsers available than I have fingers and toes to count on. This is a good thing. Like any other category of software, each browser is an app that does the same general thing in the same general way, but with specific design decisions made to prioritize different needs and goals.

My favorite browser, Firefox, puts a lot of its attention towards maintaining the privacy and security of its users. Brave is similar in that regard. Both Edge and Safari are bundled with their respective operating systems, and have interfaces geared towards helping the widest range of users browse web content. Browsers like Opera and Vivaldi are geared towards tinkerers, people who like a highly customized browsing experience. Samsung Internet is an alternative browser for Android devices that can integrate with their proprietary hardware. KaiOS and UC browsers provide access to millions of feature phones, helping them to have smartphone-esque functionality. Chrome helps you receive more personalized ads efficiently debug JavaScript.

Browser engine diversity is important as well, although the ecosystem has been getting disturbingly small as of late. The healthy competition multiple engines generates translates directly to the experience becoming better for the most important people in the room: Those who rely on the web to live their everyday lives.

Speaking of people, let’s discuss the web’s quality of diversity and how it applies to them: Our industry, like many others, has historically been plagued by ills such as misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism. However, the fact remains that the ability to solve problems in the digital space represents a rare form of leverage that allows minoritized groups to have upward economic mobility.

If you can't be motivated by human decency, it’s no secret that more diverse teams perform better. We’ve made good strides in the past few years towards better representation, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Listen to, and signal boost the triumphs, frustrations, and fears of the underrepresented in our industry. Internalize their observations and challenge your preconceived notions and biases. Advocate for their right to be in this space. Educate yourself on our industry’s history. Support things like codes of conduct, which do the hard work of modeling and codifying expectations for behavior. All of this helps to push against a toxic status quo and makes the industry better for everyone.

Standardized

The web is built by consensus, enabling a radical kind of functionality. This interoperability—the ability for different computer systems to be able to exchange information—is built from a set of standards we have all collectively agreed on.

Chances are good that a web document written two decades ago will still work with the latest version of any major browser. Any web document written by someone else—even someone on the opposite side of the globe—will also work. It will also continue to work on browsers and devices that have yet to be invented. I challenge you to name another file format that supports this level of functionality that has an equivalent lifespan.

This futureproofing by way of standardization also allows for a solid foundation of support for whatever comes next. Remember the principle of versatile: It is important to remember that these standards are also not prescriptive. We’re free to take these building blocks use arrange them in a near-infinite number of ways.

Open

Furthermore, this consensus is transparent. While the process may seem slow sometimes, it is worth highlighting the fact that the process is highly transparent. Anyone who is invested may follow, and contribute to web standards, warts and all.

It’s this openness that helps to prevent things like hidden agendas, privatization, lock-in, and disproportionate influence from consolidating power. Open-source software and protocols and, most importantly, large-scale cooperation also sustain the web platform’s long-term growth and health. Think of web technologies that didn’t make it: Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc. All closed, for-profit, brittle, and private.

It also helps to disincentive more abstract threats, things like adversarial interoperability and failure to disclose vulnerabilities. These kinds of hazards are a good thing to remember any time you find yourself frustrated with the platform.

Make no mistake: I feel a lot of what makes the web great is actively being dismantled, either inadvertently or deliberately. But as I mentioned earlier, cynicism is easy. My wish for next year? That all the qualities mentioned here are still present. My New Year’s resolution? To help ensure it.

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