once you understand that a vibrator is an accessibility tool, your understanding of disabled issues and of the world really widens

most people only think of accessibility tools in a barebones kind of way. a ramp is needed to physically enter spaces, a cane is needed so i don’t fall over while standing, captions are needed to literally be able to understand words being spoken.

some people go a little farther and understand them in terms of daily life functions, like adaptive clothing, or pre-cut food. still, these things are only seen as needing access tools because they’re baseline human functions. eating. walking. wearing clothes.

my vibrator is an access tool. because of my conditions, i can’t hold my hand where it needs to be long enough to masturbate. masturbating isn’t a necessary human function. i will not die if i don’t do it. i won’t lose my job if i don’t do it.

but the thing about a vibrator, is that it makes an aspect of life that i want to enjoy possible. disabled access is not only about the barebones basic necessities to literally be alive. if someone wants to have orgasms, a vibrator is an important tool to a pleasurable life. food delivery makes eating delicious food possible. sensory friendly live performances makes enjoying theatre and music possible. shower seats mean people can sit and enjoy a long shower that otherwise would have exhausted them. service dogs let people go out with their friends when they wouldn’t have otherwise. my cane doesn’t just help me walk, it helps me keep balance while i’m dancing at the club.

disabled people deserve so much more than to just get by. we deserve to have full, pleasurable lives, to experience all the kinds of things that able-bodied people get to experience too. access tools are meant to help us not only survive, but to really thrive too

Certified Sex ED Post!

Mobility assistance

[Transcript:

Hi, this is how I wrap presents for people with lower fine motor control; it could be older people, younger people, people with disabilities.

You can use ribbon you already have for wrapping present, and I measured around the item I am about to wrap leaving a little bit of room for the handle.

I taped the beginning end of the ribbon to the box and then loop back the extra ribbon to make a handle, and it should look something like this

You can wrap pretty much like you normally do as long as you make sure that the handle is exposed .

You could even tie something onto the handle for extra support

All done!

End Transcript]

Punctuation and spacing was added for readability but all the text is verbatim.

You don’t know how much effort I went to to find this

Fellow epileptics, I have some fantastic news for you. There’s an add-on that makes the internet safer for us. It’s called Epilepsy Blocker. The creator had me test it out, give feedback, he made adjustments, and it works great. It may even help those with migraine disorders that are triggered by the same thing that messes with those of use with photosensitive epilepsy (mine is a case of being absurdly sensitive).

This is the only add-on I’ve encountered made specifically for those of us with epilepsy. It’s not a well known add-on, but I hope to see that change.

Image description: A picture showing a simplified symbol of a wheelchair user. Arrows in circular motion depict the inaccessibility cycle. The cycle starts with Inaccessibility, goes through: disabled people unable to participate - disabled people not visible in public - disabled people seen as outlier / rarity - “so there’s little / no need to consider them” - cycle goes back to inaccessibility. Image description end.

I always see calls for subtitles. I never see calls for dubs.

Any time a scene (or entire) show or film is only available with subtitles, it’s inaccessible to many people. Dyslexic, visually impaired, neuro divergent, etc., all need such. But are often left out of the calls for accessibility.

Since so much of our media is digital, it’s really easy to provide an alternate audio track, the same way you can usually pick between languages or stereo vs Dolby. But it’s never done. If you have any issue with reading subtitles, you’re a non-entity.

Whenever you advocate for subtitles, please also advocate for dubbing. They’re two sides of the same coin. Everyone deserves accessibility.

Locking your wheelchair lift and requiring disabled people to find an employee to unlock AND OPERATE it is a direct violation of the ADA.

“The [ADA] Standards require ‘unassisted’ entry and exit from lifts (§410.1). Situations in which platform lifts are locked and require users to request or retrieve a key for operation will not satisfy this requirement for independent operation.”

“Attendant operation, although recognized by the ASME A18.1 Standard, is expressly prohibited by the ADA Standards. Platform lifts must provide ‘unassisted entry and exit from the lift’ (§410.1).”

(Source)

Smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen…

This is not great, but it’s likely because people are fucking stupid and will screw around with it if it’s not locked up.

[ID: @gavrielabrahams “It’s probably because people were peeing in it.”]

You think people were peeing. In an open wheelchair lift. In the middle of a museum. With public toilets around the corner.

I think not.

But even if people had been peeing in it or otherwise misusing the lift… It. Doesn’t. Matter. It’s not just “not great.” It’s ILLEGAL. It is just as illegal to lock off a wheelchair lift as it is to not provide one to begin with. 

The correct response to people peeing in an elevator is never to lock the elevator. It is to provide a toilet. If you think the correct response to any problem is to violate the civil rights of an entire group of people by denying them access, YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.

Disability rights are civil rights.

You want to know exactly how this went down? Let me tell you a tale.

I was visiting the museum with friends. They went on around the corner while I finished looking at the previous exhibit. I then followed them around the corner only to find I couldn’t get up to the exhibit because the museum AS PART OF THEIR POLICY had illegally locked the lift. My friends didn’t know the lift was locked (why would the lift be locked?) and had no idea that I couldn’t get to them.

Now I, the disabled person, am forced to travel halfway around the building to the front desk to find someone to unlock the lift for me, wait for them to finish what they’re doing, and then travel all the way back to the lift. This was bad enough in a wheelchair. Who else uses lifts? Oh yes. People who struggle to walk. Can you imagine, as a person who struggles to walk, being forced to walk halfway around a building, and then back again, just to access an exhibit? You wouldn’t do it. You’d skip the exhibit. You’ve just been completely denied access.

So finally the museum employee unlocks the lift and then operates it (because yes, they’ve made it so I can’t operate it myself, which is also illegal). I finally get to the top probably ten minutes later, only to find that my friends have finished looking at the exhibit and are heading down again, wondering what has happened to me. 

After I’ve gone to all the trouble to get up there, fuck it if I’m not going to look at the damn exhibit. So I look at it, then head back to the lift to go back down, only to find they’ve locked the lift with me at the top and gone back to the front desk.

If one of my friends hadn’t stayed up there with me, I’d probably still be up there. As it was, my friend had to go down the stairs, back around to the front, find an employee, and get them to come back and let me down. Leaving me sitting up there. Alone. For another five minutes.

Now imagine if I had gone to the the museum by myself. Or what if there had been an emergency? You think if there was a fire some museum employee who couldn’t be assed to leave the damn lift unlocked until I had come back down would really have run back into the building to unlock the lift so I could get down? I think not.

Locking an accessibility feature is never the right solution. It is denying access to an entire class of people. Which is ILLEGAL and a CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATION.

Disability law is civil rights law.

Turns out some film producers may be keeping streaming movies on release day a thing. Why? Because of how much money they're making from those of us who can't go to the theater.

Deaf people can have subtitles and captions without having to argue with theater managers about it.

Wheelchair users can where they damn well please instead of in the spot next to the trashcan. Yes, that's usually the only spot for a wheelchair, and often there's only one.

Epileptics can have the lights on, which is a fuck no in theaters. The lights help diminish the strobe effects created by watching things in dark rooms.

Folks with sensory input issues (ADHD and autism are good examples) can control the volume, put subtitles up, adjust the lighting, etc.

Immunocompromised folks can watch a film with virtually zero worry about catching illnesses.

Folks with allergies don't need to worry about some random person exposing them to an allergy (some folks can't even be in the same room as peanuts).

Many of us require frequent bathroom breaks. Many of us are on medicated or specialized diets. Many of us need a break (or a few) to help ground ourselves in reality, process things, burn off built-up anxiety (I need to bounce after intense scenes so i can focus), and a multitude of other reasons.

If release day streaming remains a thing, there are gonna be millions of happy people. I cried the first time I watched a streaming release day film. Ten minutes of ugly crying because it was the first time in a decade that I could watch a film without waiting six to eight months to rent it.

This is what accessibility looks like. Keep this available forever, please.

the “holding out as married” rule is so fucked up

like… not only can I not marry the love of my life without losing my health insurance and the $800 or so a month I’m forced to survive on

but I can’t even CALL her “my wife” casually

like literally the US gov’t has people whose job it is to go and interview the family, friends, & neighbors of disabled people to just make sure that they never refer to anyone in their life as “my wife” or “my husband” etc

and if you DO, then SNAP! You’re defrauding the US gov’t of the pittance you can barely survive on and you are no longer entitled to your disability benefits

(some kinds of benefits might remain in diminished form but if you were disabled before age 22 you are fucked COMPLETELY and can’t get them back even if you divorce… the only loophole is if the other person was ALSO deemed disabled before 22, because that fucking makes sense)

and this is just… legal and no one but disabled activists ever talks about this shit

so yeah I’d love some of that gay marriage shit but I will never be able to get married, and to add insult to injury, I can’t even casually refer to my partner as “my wife” without risking the health insurance and income I need to survive as a disabled lesbian

this is what we mean when we say the USA does NOT have marriage equality yet

Why Dyscalculia awareness is so important

I’d like to take a second to list all the people I wish had known more about dyscalculia growing up:

My first grade teacher, who noticed when on a verbal counting test that I went from 99 to 100 to 200 and told my parents I just needed a little practice

My third grade teacher, who couldn’t understand why I would turn in a timed multiplication table test with absolutely nothing written on it, or burst into tears when asked to bring it home and have it signed by my parents

My school corporation, who placed me in advanced mathematics for two excruciating years based on aptitude tests, apparently unaware that aptitude and ability are not one and the same

My fifth grade teacher, who privately admonished me for “laziness” because I couldn’t stop making “silly mistakes”—like switching multiplication and addition, or flipping numbers like three and eight, or failing to follow every step of a math problem

My sixth grade math teacher, who publicly called me out for writing the formula for the Pythagorean Theorem on my hand, claiming I didn’t study, though I had spent five hours the night before preparing

My parents, who grounded me every time my report card came out, trying their best to discipline what they thought was laziness

My family doctor, who, once told about my math troubles, prescribed me ADD medication without any running any kind of diagnostic

My Algebra teacher senior year after I was diagnosed, who claimed that giving me extra time on my test would be “unfair to the other students”

Every teacher who ever laughed and pointed at the clock when I asked them what time it was

The boy in my band class that said I was the “stupidest smart person he’d ever met”

My former boss, who when I told I had dyscalculia told me “I probably have it too, I am always mixing things up!” (she was an accounting major and ran the accounting portion of that place of business)

But you know who would have really benefited from knowing about dyscalculia? Me. I wish I had known. I wish I could go back and tell my ten year old self that it wasn’t my fault, that I am extraordinary in the best way. I wish someone, somewhere along the way could have seen what was really going on.

That’s why dyscalculia awareness is so important.

oh my god.

I. had no idea this was a thing. looked up the symptoms and

‘inability to tell, at a glance, how many objects are in a small group’ 

THIS. THIS IS A THING? THAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE? 

‘struggles with directions, anxious about moving from one location to another’ 

I memorized the route to all my classes in high school and yet if I didn’t have COMPLETE AND UTTER FOCUS I would STILL GET LOST it was so unbelievably stressful

‘is constantly late because struggles with understanding the passage of time’

‘struggles to read analog clocks’

‘moves too fast or too slow’

‘struggles with basic math/memorizing math facts like times tables and formulas’ 

GOD. I spent MONTHS on those times table tests; long after everyone else had gotten theirs done, I was still taking and retaking those awful, awful tests. 

And I still have to turn everything into addition to get it to make sense. 10-7? count up from 7 to 10, on my fingers. do it again to make sure I’ve done it right. 4x6? that’s 6+6+6+6.  keep track of it on my fingers. do it again to be sure. 18/3? start adding threes together, keeping track of how many it takes, on my fingers. do it again to be sure. STILL SOMETIMES GET IT WRONG because even addition is hard. 

just.

dyscalculia. 

is a thing.

thank you for this post.

I see people trash-talk Tumblr all the time but I’ve lost track of how many people have said something JUST LIKE THIS about their mental or physical health, their gender or sexual identity, and their understanding of social issues or world politics during the less-than-18-month I’ve been here than at any other website or classroom I’ve ever had a presence in.

I literally didn’t learn that I might have dyscalculia until I was studying to be a teacher and had to learn what the hell that was. And oh hey, look, I have practically every symptom but I’m about to graduate and there’s really no point in me putting forth the money to diagnose anything. Seeing kids FINALLY get something in math after working really hard at it, only to forget by the next day, JUST like I used to do, but knowing there’s nothing I can do to stop that. All I can do is teach them the little tricks I learned to remember and figure stuff out and get around the fact that I knew only about half the times tables. 

HOLY MOTHER OF PIE. 

@taraljc, look at this IT IS US. 

(Most of my symptoms have been mitigated or alleviated by technology and I would like to tell my third grade teacher: fuck you, I have a calculator with me at all times and I do not need to know my times tables FFFFFFFFF and I am not stupid or lazy for not being able to learn them)

My chemistry teacher used to write me really nasty messages on my chemistry work about how I’d get the problems right if I stopped doodling in my notebook and actually tried harder.  I asked him for help and he refused to help me because I couldn’t point to one single thing I was struggling to understand.  I could do the experiments but I couldn’t do the math.  The only reason why I didn’t fail chemistry was because we started working on organic chemistry at the end of the year, and ochem is all about shapes and drawing the molecules.  At the end of the year he gave me some kind of barely passing slacker award. I took it with a smile and didn’t cry until I got home.  I’m still hurt by it and I still hate that man.

In college, I nonstop struggled with math, I still failed chemistry a couple of times before finally savaging my way through, actually got kicked out of school but begged for them to keep me in… and when I was a second year senior, begging the math counselors to let me into trig so I could just meet my biology requirements, they took a look at my ACT scores and said “Huh, your math score is way lower than your other scores.  Have you been tested for a learning disability?”  But because I’d already been diagnosed with depression I’d have to go to an outside agency to get tested and it was going to cost me $300.

Now as an adult I’m late all the time, I miss deadlines, and people just think I’m a total unreliable flake.  I think my boss hates me.  But I managed to graduate college with a degree in Wildlife Management, become a wildlife biologist, and now an Astronomy teacher, and I still multiply by counting up on my fingers.  But whenever English teachers say shit like “Oh but you’re a science teacher, math and science go together, I can’t do that!” I want to punch them.  I can’t do it either, but I stuck my fist up the ass of the system anyway and had to fight tooth and nail to get where I am now.  Now I’m just afraid of trying to get certified as a high school science generalist and/or get my Master’s degree when I was never officially diagnosed and have never had any kind of support.

since i published this post so long ago i’ve watched it circulate tumblr and heard stories of all kinds. some people were abused by horrible parents and teachers, others had it recognized early and got the help they needed. many people are just hearing about it and suspecting they may have it themselves, which hopefully means they will get the help they need. some people even send me their stories about obstinate school staff, ableism in their homes and work, and sarcastic teachers who think we’re lazy or “slow” (god, the way they treat cognitively disabled kids… holy fuck.) i don’t always reply to all these stories because it can be taxing, but believe me when i say i read every single one. the story above gave me pause because it is one i identify with. i too had a similar struggle with my chemistry teacher.

what all these stories have made clear to me is that a) we need more awareness and testing for learning disabilities in schools and b) we need a complete overhaul of how we treat children with all kinds of learning disabilities and cognitive impairments. when i look back on the way that the “special education” kids were walled off, vilified, ridiculed, and generally ignored by the staff at the public school i attended, i realize that, in my case, no one recognizing my disability was a blessing. if someone had, i would have been treated the same way the other disabled kids were treated in my school district at that time. just like this post says, i still wish i had known, but knowing is only half the battle. we need enormous changes to our public school systems to accommodate and address learning disabilities. we need more access to testing at a lower cost. we need awareness and cooperation from teachers and parents. we need to address ableism in schools. we need to change the way teachers, parents, and students think and act. and we need to make resources for testing and therapy available to adults too, because learning disabilities don’t go away when school ends either.

when i read these stories, i feel a fire in me growing.

It was years before I ever had a name for this…years of being told that I was lazy or just plain “not smart when it comes to math.”

Reblogging for awareness

Disability benefits should be the equivalent of a full time job on living wage. Things don’t cost less because you’re disabled - in fact you often have additional costs of living. You shouldn’t be forced into poverty because you are disabled.

Before anyone comes in with ’ but then ppl would lie so they didn’t have to work!’

Two responses

Universal basic income + better wages is the way forward

Who fucking cares? Not me. This insistence that ppl lie to get benefits and as a result benefits should be a fucking pittance that it’s humiliating to apply for just fucks over disabled people and is inhumane

Hot take but sign language should be taught in schools as a language option and all cinemas should provide subtitles on all their movie screenings