Actually Blind - Tumblr Posts
I want to make a rentry about screenreader accessibility!!
Why do you use a screenreader? Is it due to a disability?
What are common inaccessibility issues you come across?
What information would you like to see in an informational rentry or carrd about screenreaders, plaintext, and image descriptions?
Feel free to link to resources in your reblog for a resource masterlist as well!
Pings: @mightyoctopus @accessibleaesthetics @accessible-tumbling
Does anyone know a good way to make small run or individual shirt prints? I've always wanted to make one with acurate braille (the kind blind people actually read, not some half baked online font) that says "If you can read this, stop touching me" and why not now? XD
Top 5 MOST useful tools for blind people just starting out
Top 5 most fave tools for the blind overall
Top 5 least useful
Top 5 fucking weirdest and/or funniest
This is a big ask and I will do my best to answer, with the caveat that I am just a single blind person with memory issues who doesn't remember everything my blind friends have told me. XD I am counting other people as tools in this list because a person with eyes sometimes is a handy tool for us. XD
Top 5 MOST useful tools for blind people just starting out 1. White cane 2. Blindness skills training through centers, government programs like Vocational Rehabilitation, Orientation & Mobility specialists, and anywhere you can find it 3. Membership with the National Talking Book Library aka NLS in your state (US); I think the UK is RNIB and Canada has one, not sure about other countries 4. Supportive family and friends and other blind people if you can find them 5. Screen reader (NVDA is free for Windows, iPhone has VoiceOver, Android uses TalkBack)
Top 5 most fave tools for the blind overall 1. White cane and/or guide dog 2. Text to speech, screen readers, audio books, audio described movies and tv 3. Accessible smart phones (often iPhone but Android is catching up) 4. Bump dots (stick-on tactile dots you put around your home) 5. Braille and refreshable braille displays/notetakers
Top 5 least useful 1. Sighted people inventing crap without talking to any blind people ("smart" canes, "smart" shoes, dangerous devices you hold in your only free hand that claim to tell you what's in front of you but actually don't, screen reader breaking "accessibility" overlays, etc...) 2. That ring which only shows one braille cell at a time (that's not how anyone reads) 3. Strangers giving/yelling vague directions ("It's right over there!", "Oh my god watch out for the stairs (that you are halfway down)!", giving directions to the guide dog who doesn't speak English or any language because they are a dog...) 4. Hot liquid measuring devices (always broken, the noise they make is so fucking loud it's caused me a lot more injury than just sticking my finger in the hot liquid, will wake up the neighbors) 5. All but one use case of AI claiming to be for the blind, at least as far as I've seen
Top 5 fucking weirdest and/or funniest 1. Ping pong balls (good for measuring hot liquids) 2. Funnels (really helpful for pouring liquids) 3. The lanyard strap that sticks to the back of your phone so you can wear it around your neck (looks silly, is incredibly useful) 4. White cane holster (yes it's a thing, I have at least three XD) 5. Things being organized Very Specifically (close your eyes and YOU try to find the remote after someone put it in a random place! XD)
This may be a duplicate ask because Tumblr may or may not have eaten my first attempt.
1 - When did you start creating art?
3 - What are your favorite subjects to draw? (OCs, your fan faves, etc.)
5 - What piece of art are you still proud of to this day? (Show or describe)
8 - How would you describe your art style?
20 - What motivates/inspires you artistically? (topics, emotions, etc)
from this ask game
Thank you for such an extensive ask! I wasn't expecting that! :)
Somewhere around 4 years old. Realized people could draw things after a preschool trip to a doctor's office that had a human heart diagram and I never stopped. :D
3. Favorite subjects can vary. Usually it's whatever I'm hyperfocused on at the time. :D I always love drawing my OCs though. They're designed specifically to be fun for me to draw and they are. :D
5. I'm always kind of proud of things I've completely forgotten about but when I stumble on them again months/years later it's like "oh hey, wow! That's pretty good!" Many of them I can't share here for Reasons but I enjoy being able to do work for clients that is not of personal interest but which I can do so well that people assume it is. At random, I just opened my art folders and this early digital piece from 2017(?) is pretty rad! That border was all hand drawn because I could. XD
8. I always say I'm a cartoonist with a specialty in character illustration.
20. I read so much nonfiction and watch a lot of documentaries and it all sort of soaks into my sponge-like brain, swirls together, and falls out as some very trippy "yeah, but what if...?" ideas. :D I get the occasional greatly weird idea from dreams too. A lot of it is just making a shape with arm and going off of how something feels to draw; a simple line swish becomes the angle of a face or the direction of a body in motion. And of course I get constant inspiration from straight up misinterpreting the world around me, for both physical and mental reasons. Being almost totally blind means that what reality looks like is very subjective and there is so much I encounter that I don't even recognize for what it is, which translates to fun ideas for art. Combine that with ADHD and I am never without an idea or twenty. :D I like to say art is "advanced fidgeting" for me: if I can't draw or write or imagine, my brain starts to feel literally itchy and I don't like it. XD
A blind friend of mine was nearly killed by mislabelled meds and I certainly struggle with mine because I can't read them and accessible pharmacy anything is really hard to get (never did get a call back from ScripTalk). I'd love to be able to just read a label when I'm having a migrain and can't use my eyes too, that would be rad.
Speaking of jokes, here's my favorite blind joke (heard on Discord):
Two guys are at a urinal and one notices the other is blind.
"Hey man, can I help you?" says the first guy.
"Sure," the blind guy says. "Can you hold my stick?"
The sighted man reaches for the guy's white cane.
"No, the big one."
inspired by your tags on that gifset about blue eyed samurai: please tell me about the best and worst blind representation in media according to you
Had to wait until I was at a keyboard and had the energy for this one haha.
Honestly, most blind rep is bad, to the extent that I avoid anything touting a blind character on instinct. Unless another blind person is recommending it, I prep myself to endure, at best, a lot of tedious stereotyping, and at worst something that will genuinely make me angry. I'm always surprised when I can unclench a bit over a blind character and be able to say just "eh he's alright".
But! There are a few blind characters I do like! While they are not perfect and somewhat fall into the realm of "blind in name only" (where magic or something else makes them function more like a sighted person), Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender and Terezi Pyrope of Homestuck get my nod of approval. While they both have some abilities that make them seem more sighted (Toph's earthbending, Terezi's super smelling/tasting), I find they get at some of the heart of what it's like to be blind. Toph has a viciously sharp sense of humor and leans into peoples' low expectations to tear them apart and the show isn't afraid to crack a few genuinely funny jokes about blindness. Similarly, Terezi is a delightful smartass who actually uses a white cane correctly (woohoo!) while taking advantage of peoples' ignorances. And both of them have friends who treat them as people first, which is incredibly rare in any media we're in. Terezi also has a very powerful moment in which she undoes a magical cure for blindness, something I have never seen anywhere else, which makes her stronger but also strikes at something the able bodied community always takes for granted: maybe we don't want to live in your world. That moment by itself was enough to have me make an homage to Terezi in my legal name when I changed it.
I have only seen the one movie so far but I like what I've encountered of Zatoichi, the blind swordsman. The stereotypes he falls into are not western ones so that kind of helps, and he has a fantastic confidence which he masks by playing up being a helpless blind man. It's very satisfying to watch him kick ass endlessly. :D
Also Gareth or whatever his name is from Quest for Camelot; it's a dumb movie but I will always give extra points for a character using a cane like we actually use them! The movie gets points for not curing his blindness and for a joke I quote to this day ("What are you doing?!" "I'm driving!"). XD Points lost for face touching though, GOD. Stop doing that, sighted people! It's weird and gross and the only time I ever want to touch anyone's face is with my fist!
In terms of the worst, if I ever meet the author of this one book I read which featured a totally helpless, whining blinded knight who becomes a total asshole when he's magically healed (also fuck magically curing disabilities), I will beat them over the head with their own shitty book and then make them eat it one page at a time. I didn't even finish that pile of trash, it made me so angry. Oh, and the entire book/movie titled Blindness. I'm glad that motherfucker is dead because fuck that guy. Not only is it a massive insult to the blind, it shits on what people are really like in a crisis. Honorable mention to that one very dumb movie where the blind war veteran is the movie monster, but it is at least good for a ton of laughs right up until it just veers off a cliff into "what the fuck?!" canyon, after which it is just a singularity of stupid.
Speaking of blind things, today I saw someone write “no alt text” in their image description and that is just about the most insulting thing I’ve seen it used for. Just leave it blank if you don’t wanna describe, asshole! Unnecessary alt text blocks a screen reader from being able to try and interpret an image, so either describe it or don’t!
If you put a link in the alt text I will come to your house and throw my white cane through your window like a javelin. Don’t do that shit. Sighted people won’t see it and I literally can’t make use of it.
In good news, AccessiBe is finally getting the shit surd out of them for lying to customers and making the web worse with their shitty overlays and I am ecstatic. :D
Finally, a blind guy who agrees with me about how shitty AI is for us! Also a good talk about how shitty accessibility is in general and why that's pushed so many of us to the margins AND keep reading to find out how you can block AI read audiobooks (which are bullshit and a waste of your time).