@miss-ingno / miss-ingno.tumblr.com
Me: Hey film studios can I have some light in these scenes?
Film studios:
Me: Hey can I have some subtitles?
Film studios:
Me: Hey can I have some actual sound?
Film studios:
[id in alt text]
Just by the way this post is specifically about how the film industry is inaccessible to disabled folks, this isn't about lazy writing, this isn't about diversity hires, this is about how movies and TV shows aren't accessible to disabled audiences.
[ID: Kate on Twitter @KateAndCRPS “Now that there is coronavirus there are so many accommodations being made so people can work/study remotely. Why is this so hard to do when disabled people need this to participate in society? If the world can give #AccessibilityForAbleds give it to disabled people too.”]
[ID: Comment by @GlindaTheGolden “Went off on a coworker for saying ‘it's because the virus is a legitimate issue’ as if a disability isn't.”]
“it’s because the virus affects me, personally, and I don’t care about other people”
Fixed that.
actually, I just had the same thought yesterday: the virus is contagious, disability isn’t. which basically boils down to what Pie said. suddenly having an in-person meeting might mean your *boss* gets infected, so since your boss decides what accomodations to make, suddenly it’s much easier.
(though I assume changing the norm has a partial effect on this, too. since *everyone* is doing it to stay safe, it becomes the responsible and accepted thing to do, rather than a leniency granted from up high /s)
If you feel like telling someone that a common word is ableist:
Learn about wheelchair accessibility standards (text alternative), find a local business that flagrantly ignores them (which is very easy) and contact the manager to say, “My disabled friend would love to visit your shop/bar/restaurant, but it isn’t wheelchair accessible!” (If the staff have to move or unlock something, that isn’t accessible —especially if you have to go inside to request it)
Boom. You’ve done more for disabled people than 50 callouts for the word “lame”. I hate that word used as a pejorative too! But of the two methods of activism, this one gets way more shit done.
The other thing that gets me about ableism dialogue on the broader Internet being 90% centered on word choice is that… I think it serves to make conversations and socially aware spaces less accessible to some people. Me, for example: I find that the additive cognitive load of monitoring my vocabulary for potentially ableist words and turns of phrase to be an extremely reliable overload trigger. I’m constantly semi-consciously monitoring my everything anyway when I’m communicating–hi, I’m autistic–and when I overload my ability to manage that cognitive load, I get very anxious, generally erode my mental health, and stop being able to participate in conversation at all. I have effectively lost access to the community or discussion where these modes of politeness take root.
(What I generally do instead is keep note of certain words that certain people I know cannot handle because they are poisoned forever for them, and I avoid those words around those people. That’s a cognitive expenditure that is worth it to me: I’m willing to budget the cognitive energy if it’s a use that is actually directly helping someone else. One thing I find that a lot of currently non-disabled people don’t think about is that not all accommodations and access needs for disabled people are compatible with one another at all times, and this is a common example of that sort of thing.)
Moreover, a lot of people have begun using a “fence around the sin” approach to ableist language: I have been “corrected” for metaphorical references to disability that aren’t necessarily pejorative, like “willfully blind.” Not only does this re-emphasize the cognitive load concerns that I I’m concerned that this trend of treating all references to disability as off-limits in language increases the euphemism treadmill that tends to affect several types of disability, effectively acting as if there is something shameful about referencing disabled people at all. Which… doesn’t solve the problem of the ableism in the language. It’s just that the slur is in the opinion that the slur-thrower has of the people the word applies to, and that’s often what people are really doing when they use ableist slurs. You fix the slurs not by placing them off limits entirely but by changing the opinion that the general public has about the people they refer to: think about reclaiming “queer” and pushing back against “that’s so gay”; these successful movements work because they reaffirm the humanity of queer and gay people in the minds of people who would otherwise use those identities and comparisons to them to denote bad things. If that doesn’t happen–and the disability euphemism treadmill is notorious for this–you just cycle through acceptable and unacceptable words for the same concepts, because the concept of a given disability is the origin of the insult. As long as that concept is poisoned, any word that describes it will become poisoned, too.
And the thing is, I just pointed out that my own experience of disability is such that I have been known to actively request that people not police my language as an accommodation, because I can’t handle the cognitive load of balancing that with the semi-conscious load of balancing the cognitive demands of monitoring the nonverbal shit? Yeah, uh, I have known people to respond to that request for accommodation with total rage, and by telling me that I am being hateful, and dropping me completely. If your disability activism involves reacting like that to a good-faith accommodation request over word choice, your disability activism is not good.
The problem with hard and fast rules (like “you must be able to take your own notes to succeed in college,” or “this word is never acceptable”) is that by its very nature, hard and fast rules without any thought taken to consider accommodation and accessibility for people with a wide variety of unexpected needs create barriers for disabled people. I don’t see a lot of awareness of this in people whose disability activism focuses largely around call-outs for word choice, and I really do not see people really interacting with the super useful concepts for disability, like the curb cut effect or accessible design or varying models of disability or conflicting accommodation or or. It just… winds up being about word choice and social signaling that one is The Right Sort Of Person.
(I’m pretty sure you know all of this already, star-anise, but I figured: maybe someone reading me doesn’t. So.)
Holy fucking little demonlings this.
Ableist word callouts are good for: Major corporations, polished and proofread press releases, published works, people you already know and have cordial relations for, really serious slurs meant as slurs.
Ableist word callouts are terrible for: People casually going about their day online, common metaphors not used in an especially negative sense, DISABLED PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THEIR LIVES, TOTAL STRANGERS.
Again, I’m disabled, I’ve done disabled activism, I’ve seen and taken part in ableist word awareness campaigns, and let me tell you, unless you’re smart about where, when, and who you do it with, you’re going to inspire a lot more irritation, ill will, and disengagement than good results.
Ableist word policing done wrong makes people not want to talk about disabled people at all. And that means our issues don’t get the publicity and support we need.
Want to help out disabled people? Like and leave a comment on a video of wheelchair dancing on Youtube. Write up descriptions of images, videos, and comics that aren’t accessible to people who use screenreaders. Write out a transcript of a video or podcast for people who can’t listen to the audio version. Ask event organizers if a space is wheelchair accessible, if speakers can use microphones, if there will be a Sign translator, if they can include a field for special dietary needs on the signup form.
For the love of tiny purple dragons, please do ANY THING ELSE other than bad, misaimed, counterproductive ableist word policing.
I want to gently disagree on “published works” there, unless you’re also willing to commit to marking down what year awareness became wide-spread, and check the copyright dates accordingly.
I grew up in California in the 1980s. “Ugh, that’s lame” was literally the motto of my childhood. No one ever told me it was ableist. You might feel like that’s something I should have just known, but it wasn’t. I’d never heard it applied to my grandfather, who walked with a cane, or to my friend Tiffany, who used a wheelchair. It was just a word.
I was diagnosed with OCD at the age of nine. People called me crazy because I was weird as hell, but my actual diagnosis was “OCD.” “Crazy” never felt diagnostic, and hence never felt ableist, because it wasn’t my diagnosis. It was just a word.
My first book came out in 2009. I legitimately did not know that either of these words was considered ableist and hence negative until 2014. So if you read my very first published work, from 2009, I know you’ll hit “crazy.” I can’t say for sure on “lame.” It’s 2019 now. Calling me out for that book does no good. I can’t change it. I’ve been called out a few dozen times already. I’ve apologized. I’ve made an effort going forward.
TL;DR: Call out the authors of published works based on recent publications, or you won’t be making things better, you’ll be bullying people based on potentially very real ignorance.
Yep. I like @wheeloffortune-design‘s formula for how much someone deserves a callout:
(Take how bad the thing they did or said was, how many times they did it, and how powerful they are; then divide that by how much time since the thing, truthfulness of the apology, and how much better they are now.)
And a lot of times I feel like this form of activism assumes all disabled people will feel the same ways about certain words.
I have osteoarthritis and use both a walker and a wheelchair depending on my pain level. I am physically disabled and I cannot work. I also have bi-polar disorder, ADHD, severe depression and anxiety, and several learning disabilities.
And aside from words like “retard” and “cripple” I really do not care if abled people use words like dumb, lame, crazy, insane, stupid, or any other common slang that is usually not applied to disabled people anymore. I know not everyone is going to feel that way, and other disabled people’s opinions on these words are vaild, but so are mine. And I don’t like being shamed for using them and told I am somehow hurting myself by calling saying that I had a crazy day.
So yeah, unless those words are actively being hurled at disabled people as a form of violence, I really do not give a crap if people call a rude customer dumb or say that the rollercoasters as six flags are crazy or the prices at the fanciest restaurant in town are insane. It isnt being used to discredit disabled people and therefore I dont care.
If another disabled person doesnt like those words being used around them I will stop, but too often I have been spoken over by abled people telling me that it’s wrong for me to use words as if my opinions as a disabled person don’t count because they are “wrong”.
This discourse is exhausting and doesnt really accomplish anything and at the end of the day there are way better ways to help disabled people instead of yelling at someone on tumblr who used the word lame.
Oh my god, yes, this this this, especially “all disabled people will feel the same way about X.”
Even aside from individual variation in opinion, I find the specific disabilities you have also shape the way you approach ableism and defining what disability is to you. I find a lot more folks with autism or who are Deaf who resonate strongly with social models of disability and react poorly to the threat of cures, for example, and a lot fewer people who deal with chronic pain or certain kinds of mood disorders who take that position. (Which is not to say that all people with those particular conditions feel that way; it’s that the context of the specific person shapes the opinions they form about where problems in their way lie and what is actually worth fixing.)
It’s complicated! And in my experience TAB people/people who have never really had a reason to pay attention to disability dialogue have absolutely no idea that “disability” is kind of like “person of color” in that it encompasses a whole huge group of smaller communities that have their own historic tensions and needs and overlap in some but not all people.
hey guys!! i tried to get in contact with discord about adding a dyslexic font and they told me the easiest way to get a change to happen was to post a feedback idea and get votes on it, so if you guys could vote for accessibility for people who are dyslexic, color blind, and visually impaired in other ways it would mean a lot to me! thank you!
Did y’all know that Twitter has a feature that allows you to add image descriptions to your tweets?
Buzzfeed published an article about it today, and until I read it, I had no idea. It’s under the accessibility settings, and it lets you add a description to your images that won’t be visible to someone scrolling through Twitter, but will be detected by screen readers and read aloud.
At the moment, this feature is only available for still images, not GIFs or videos, but I still think everyone who is able to should utilize it. Maybe if we all start putting descriptions on our images, Twitter will expand the feature and maybe even add more accessibility tools.
I was thinking about your redesigns and the problems about making stuff accessible to aliens, and I was thinking what if the Federation has the ships built in 'parts' that get put together? like the bridge is a blank slate with spots for the consoles and you can put in the klingon vs bajoran vs benzite accessible consoles as the officers get hired. so if your vulcan navigator retires and a tellarite takes their place the console gets swapped out.
this is great! ships like models kits, with interchangeable pieces to fit the crew. there could be prefabricated pieces for quarters to, all made so that they suit a particular species but can fit into a designated space.
For some species, their quarters are the only place where they can be entirely comfortable; every other part of the ship is, by necessity, a compromise between those species using it. the gravity is less than on Tellar but higher than Vulcan so both people must adapt. But for officers, the quarters can be their own customized home away from home.
people can use the same consoles if their senses and appendages are mostly analogous. A Klingon could use and LCARS panel like a human, but they’d have a different colour scheme to fit their different range of the EM spectrum. An Elaysian on the other hand would need something radically different—the holotank used by Melora Pazlar aboard the USS Titan would do nicely! Probably nicer than for an inexplicably humanoid low-gravity species (i still headcanon they’re colonists, not an indigenous species.) Haptic hoods for Benzites who don’t have to see, panels for Bolians that support their posture, a system that responds to Andorians’ many claws; there is so much!
i realised, the word I was looking for was ‘modular’ - modular starfleet ships! My personal headcanon for canon starfleet though is that the reason we see mostly humanoids is that we’re on the ships built for humanoids.
Diane Duane’s Trek novels have some fantastic stuff with Starfleet ships built for non-humanoids, and humanoid-standard ships building modifications for when they’re temporarily hosting, e.g., a talking dolphin.
