Tag: accessibility
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Accommodations: Individualized Responses to Structural Design Problems
The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual. @laurenancona Yet on a programmatic basis, disability policy and other social programs remain enmeshed, even at their best, in accommodation models, where specific proven needs or deficits generate specific individualized responses. What might it look like to shift our framing of the social safety net to…
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Inclusive Meetings, Classes, and Presentations with Access Notes, Bodymind Affirmations, and Small Changes
I’ve noticed a trend among neurodivergent and disabled speakers, notably Lydia X. Z. Brown and Jonathan Mooney, of prefacing their presentations with an access note and a bodymind affirmation. They encourage people, be it in an auditorium or a group video chat, to move around and get comfortable. I believe we should all move in…
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Defining Ableism
Excerpted below are quotes from community writing and scholarly studies on the definition, history, and forms of ableism. Content notes: ableism, racism, sexism, white supremacy, slavery, ABA, cure, defectiveness, eugenics, scientific racism, torture, murder, police violence, state violence, suicide, institutionalization, imprisonment Ableism A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally…
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Disability Dongles: Designing for the Individual, Not the Collective
“I feel like solutions to inaccessibility are often rooted in whiteness, because anyone who doesn’t think about it would think it’s cool but the reality is that they’ve created accessibility for the individual, not the collective and reinforces the class hierarchy because the wealthy would be the only ones with complete accessibility.” Source: Imani Barbarin…
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Emotion Matters in Alt Text: Text Descriptions and Emotion Rich Images
The relevant parts of an image aren’t limited to the cold hard facts. Images can make you feel a particular way, and that’s something that should be made available to a screen reader user. “Emotion matters” really changed how I think about writing alt text. Léonie wrote a longer article on the idea, which I…
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Inclusion Through Options: There is no one size fits all when it comes to accessibility.
While you can read an in-detail breakdown of all accessibility settings in the game, what The Last of Us 2 creators did extremely well was not succumbing to the idea of ‘accessibility modes’. “‘We want to be able to dig into the menus, fine-tune things, adjust things, really get into the nitty-gritty of what these…
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Intersectionality and Professionalism
The Center for Intersectional Justice explains that one key aspect of recognizing intersectionality is “fighting discrimination within discrimination, tackling inequalities within inequalities, and protecting minorities within minorities.” If conversations about equity are not considering the intersecting identities of those involved in the planning and decision making individually and as a collective, then the question comes…
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Back to Normal, Back to Inaccessible
Over on my personal blog, I wrote about the post-lockdown return to inaccessibility. “Autistic people have significant barriers to accessing safety.” Likewise physically disabled people. Lockdown bettered accessibility and neurological pluralism, and thus safety, in myriad ways that are now disappearing. Source: Back to Normal, Back to Inaccessible – Ryan Boren
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Politically and Culturally-engaged Collaborators, Not Just Users and Testers
Clinical, charitable, and institutional channels serve to weed out isolated, multiply marginalized, independent activists, scholars, and artists—those who may be suspicious of large-scale, centralized approaches to advocacy and the ways they tend to concentrate power. By relying primarily on charities as recruitment channels, Unilever effectively ensured that politically and culturally engaged disabled people were excluded…
