Remaking Bc My Post Has Lost Traction And We've Hit The Seriously Urgent Territory. My Rent Is Due By

remaking bc my post has lost traction and we've hit the seriously urgent territory. my rent is due by midnight tomorrow. currently, i have 250 usd of the 1200 i need. needless to say i'm freaking out. please help us if you are able to do so.

i just landed a fulltime position. i started last thursday and don't get paid until mid september. i really hope this is the last month that i have ask for help like this. please please please i am begging you. consider helping us stay in our home for month of september.

260 / 1200 urgent.

Thinking on making a shapeshifter form journal! Just journaling the ways I sometimes feel.

Priority list for the coming week!

05/09/2024 - 12/09/2024

These are fundraisers that my vetter @moayesh has told me are high priority either due to the low amount of funds or due to the situation the person is in. If you donate to any of these, please leave a screenshot below so I can tally the amounts donated to the fundraisers!

Hazem Mohammed Al-Bardaweel: Hazem has lost his wife and children in a bombing that injured him badly. He needs help starting anew while grieving the loss of his family to genocide.

Hossam Bardaweel: Hossam has lost his parents and all his siblings, and is now left to care for his siblings' children and widows on his own. He needs help supporting them while grieving the loss of his family to genocide.

Namer Matar: Namer has lost his baby due to a sudden illness that affected his newborn twins. The family is devastated, and his wife is struggling with postpartum in conditions of genocide while grieving her newborn.

Mohammed Matar: Mohammed's entire future as a water infrastructure engineer, and the company he was setting the building blocks for are all gone. He now has to care for his children and his wife struggling with postpartum in conditions of genocide.

Rania Youssef: Rania's father was the breadwinner of the family. He suffered from an untreated chronic illness that took his life during the acceleration of the genocide. She needs help taking care of her family while they grieve this immense loss.

Connecting Humanity is EXTREMELY LOW on esims right now - yesterday (September 1 2024) they posted an update saying they had ZERO ESIMS LEFT. The need for esims is greater than ever, so if you've got a few dollars to spare, please donate one!

Incentives to donate:

AMVs by various @amvs4palestine creators

Pet portraits and sketches by @mollybrooks

Writing commissions and help with homework/emails by @bluedabadeedabadie

Star Wars art commissions by @swartists4palestine

Art commissions by various @cartoonistcoop creators

Portrait commissions by @coyoxxtl

Donate an esim here or here. Don't know how? Check out these resources!

This looks safe

Backrooms creature design video!

You added an "image description" to my post - now what? (FAQ)

[Plain text: "You added an 'image description' to my post - now what? (FAQ)". End PT.]

While I'm literally always willing to answer (good faith) questions about image descriptions, alt text, and online accessibility writ large, I also know lots of people have social anxiety about sending DMs, doing IDs "wrong," or just not knowing what IDs are for in the first place. Hence, this FAQ.

If I added an ID to your post and/or asked you to do so, and you're confused about any aspect of that, this is where to start. You can absolutely still reach out to me, I just thought I should consolidate as many answers as possible.

"What is an ID and why does it matter?"

IDs are a description of the content of an image, and can range from a transcript of a screenshot of text, to a description of a detailed piece of art. They should be in plain text, and placed on the line immediately following the image (unless it's alt text, more on those pros and cons later).

IDs are primarily for blind and low vision people who use screen readers to navigate the internet — but help others too, including lots of neurodivergent people. Check out this post (link) and the notes for more examples (dyslexics, migraine sufferers, people who can't interpret expressions, people with slow internet...)

IDs are important because without them, the Internet really sucks for people who need them. You probably don't realize how many undescribed images circulate on tumblr every day, with no way for a lot of disabled people to engage with those posts.

A blind person talks in more detail about all of this here (link).

"I reblogged your ID, is that enough?"

It's not that I don't appreciate it, but editing it into the root post and then reblogging that is much more impactful, for a variety of reasons. It means people who need IDs don't have to dig through the notes for them, it means that Tumblr can't glitch by failing to load the notes and make the ID functionally disappear, and it means all people who find the post in the tags or on your blog will be sharing the accessible version.

To explain visually, the best thing to do is something like this:

[ID: two mock-up Tumblr posts to illustrate adding an ID from the notes to the root post. A blog named "your-blog" posts an image of text reading "something cool you posted" with the caption "check out this cool image I made!" In the notes, the blog "image-describer" reblogs with an ID, which is highlighted. This version of the post is labeled: "original post, reblogged via ID writer."

The second version of the post is from "your-blog" again, where they've added the ID directly under the image, with the same caption below the ID. This version is labeled "updated root post, with ID copy-pasted. End ID.]

"My caption/commentary first, or ID first?"

Include the ID right under the image, followed by your caption or commentary. Unless you're putting your commentary before the image itself, a sighted person will see "image, commentary" in that order, so to ensure the post flows the same way, use the order "image, ID, commentary."

Commentary frequently assumes that the reader has seen the image, after all! A person might not even realize the image is described if the ID is buried too deep, because they might lose patience and skip the post. Or, to explain visually:

[ID: two mock-up example posts with an ID, one formatted well and one poorly. They both start with an image, which is just the text "screenshot of a tweet or something." The first post includes the ID immediately under the image. Below, it continues: "commentary blah blah blah get a load of this guy can you believe it." The post is labeled "Like this!" in green with a check mark.

The second post includes the commentary first, then the ID after the commentary. It's labeled: "Reads awkwardly, deprives screen reader users of immediate context" in red with an X. End ID.]

"I want to make a change to the ID, is that okay?"

Yep! If you want me to change it on my blog too (whether it's characters' pronouns, some typo, etc), just message me.

"What if someone else adds an ID to my post? Would they also be okay with me editing it into the original post like you are?"

Almost certainly! I can't speak for everyone, but I've literally never met an ID who wouldn't be okay with it — because we all have the shared goal of maximizing accessibility. If you're unsure or nervous, you can always include credit, but most people are even fine with going uncredited.

"I put your ID in the alt text, is that enough?"

I will never tell you not to use alt text when the alternative is an undescribed post, but I really strongly suggest putting it in both the alt text and the post. Some people who use screen readers prefer the flow of alt text, for good reason — but it's also poorly implemented on Tumblr, and it can glitch and disappear on reblogs, in drafts, or just apropos of nothing.

Moreover, when a low-vision person or anyone else wants to read the alt text directly, Tumblr's display options aren't great. (Unless you use XKit Rewritten's AccessKit, which I will always plug, but that's not an option for mobile users.) Long alt text often extends off the page and gets cut off. Tumblr used to use a terrible eye-straining purple background for it, and could always do that again with no warning. It's just not ideal.

Here's a visually impaired person talking more about the pros and cons (link).

It seems we're in need of a compromise, so what can you do? One option is to include the same alt text as image description (placing the ID directly under the image as always, because remember, flow for screen readers is important). I like to lead with "ID from alt," in order to clarify to screen reader users that they can skip the ID, and help differentiate it from the other option I'm about to describe. This should be self-explanatory, but here's an example of a post I did in this style (link).

Option two is to include a short description in the alt text, and a more detailed explanation in-post. This can let screen reader users instantly know that the post is described, and decide whether they're interested enough in it to stick with it, but it maintains an in-post description for others to benefit from too.

Example of me doing this in a post about IDs (link)

Example of my mutual describing art like this (link)

Also, it's the style I follow throughout this exact post! Take a look!

As usual, the ID is directly below the image in all these cases. This means screen readers move immediately from the alt text to the full description, and the post flows the same way it would for a sighted person.

If you're here because I wrote an ID for you, it might be easier for you to put it in the alt text and the post body identically, and that's perfectly fine! But if you're confident writing one short sentence for the alt text and including my ID in the body, you can always go for that too!

"Do I need to keep the brackets or the words 'image description/ID' in the alt text?"

Nope, no need. Brackets are purely for the visual distinction, and most screen readers preface alt text with something like "Image" that fulfills the same purpose. It's not the end of the world if they're there, but it's redundant, so feel free to remove them.

"Can I put the ID under a read more? Or in small text?"

Please don't. Read mores are glitchy, and oftentimes have to be opened in a new tab. Accessibility that requires jumping through extra hoops isn't accessibility. And worse, if you change your URL or get deactivated, that read more link is usually just gone for good, and the post is undescribed again.

Meanwhile, small text, italics, colored text, and so on aren't good for low vision people or others who read the IDs directly — such as with increased font size — for whatever reason. If you want the ID to stand out visually even more than with brackets, an indent is fine as far as I know. And remember, IDs always go immediately below the image!

"Why do you sometimes copy italics and stuff as plain text? Is that a screen reader thing too?"

Same reason IDs shouldn't be in small text, italics, etc. Font in weird styles, or in a fixed size regardless of device settings (to my knowledge, this includes headings) isn't very accessible, so I try to provide an accessible transcript.

Colored text is sometimes even inaccessible to sighted people using certain Tumblr themes! If Tumblr gave individual users the option to disable small text and colors on their dash, then I'd tell you to use them to your heart's content, but as it stands, they're not very accessible.

"Okay, I want to make my blog more accessible, but I don't feel capable of writing IDs on my own. How can I get help?"

Good news, this is my absolute favorite question! I strongly recommend the People's Accessibility Discord (invite link here, please let me know if it breaks).

It was created for this exact purpose of crowdsourcing IDs (and answering questions about them). I talk about it more in this post (link), where I also describe an alternative if you're like me and have massive social anxieties about Discord servers.

TL;DR: ask in the post if someone can add an image description, and edit it in once someone does! If you've read this far in the post, you're clearly an expert on how to do that.

In that post, I also recommend OnlineOCR (link) and Google Lens to extract text from images and save you typing if it's just a twitter thread or something. I would always spot check the text, adjust formatting, and remove superfluous characters, but it usually saves you lots of time when you might not normally have the energy to describe something.

Lastly, a lot of description blogs take requests! I don't unless I specify otherwise, because I easily run out of spoons, but @accessible-art is a great example of a blog that does this for non-fandom art, and there are lots of fandom blogs out there that do similar.

"I want to learn how to write image descriptions for my posts! Do you have any resources?"

This is my image description masterpost (link). I get a little scared about linking it because it's long, and a lot of the linked posts are long, and I don't want to overwhelm people — so please, start with the first few links to get the broad strokes, and then feel free to treat the rest like a index. That is, peruse it if you're looking for answers or advice on a specific topic!

While learning, keep in mind that different ID users want different things out of IDs, and that's okay. Some people, including many blind people, care quite a bit about color, but others don't, and that doesn't mean either is wrong about the types of IDs they prefer versus ones they find unnecessary.

Blind people have a massive range of lived experiences, and all the other people who benefit from IDs broaden that range even more. Generally, no one involved wants huge walls of text, but some people prefer super-minimal IDs, while others prefer a nice handful of (relevant) details. It's stuff like the difference between "Two characters hugging in a cozy-looking house," versus "Two characters hugging with their eyes closed, both smiling. Their house looks cozy and cluttered, with warm lighting."

Neither of those is objectively wrong, and there will be people who prefer either. Nor is it wrong for you, the ID writer, to make a subjective judgement, such as on the "cozy" mood. You don't want to misrepresent things, but subjectivity is usually unavoidable on some level, and therefore fine.

In my opinion, IDs are easiest to learn by doing, but also by starting small. If you want to build up your "description muscles" and confidence by just transcribing tweets, that's perfectly fine — and also, the path that myself and a lot of people I know have followed.

Lastly: follow some described blogs! Check out how other people do it! Writing IDs is an art, and though it has a few hard do's and don't's we've gone over, we've also gone over how it's subjective. Everyone brings a slightly different style, with a different level of lengthiness, and it's great to learn from multiple sources. Here's one list of blogs like those (link)!

"Why would this matter if I know I don't have any blind people following me?"

Consider the cycle of inaccessibility (link). If no one ever accommodates blind people, then of course you're not going to see them on Tumblr, in fandom, or in whatever internet circles! And blind people aren't the only people who need image descriptions — again, consider this post, especially this addition (link).

Worst case scenario, even if you have no one who can benefit from IDs either following you, and no people who need IDs would follow you even if you included them, you're still helping people who do maintain accessible blogs to do so — and moreover, normalizing image descriptions in general.

"I don't think blind people would be in this fandom. I mean, there's a huge visual component!"

Described comics and webcomics exist. Audio descriptions for TV shows and movies exist. Disabled people who find creative ways to play video games exist. People who watched a playthrough of a video game by a person who happened to read out the dialogue, and give descriptive commentary on the action, also exist. People who lose their vision over time, or gain other reasons to rely on IDs over time, also exist.