Just Blind Things - Tumblr Posts

This is so friggin' cool! 8D If you go to their displays page, you can hear some of the graphs!

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."

Heard the best thing about allies yesterday in a speech about how self identified allies honestly kinda suck and do more harm than good: I don't want an ally, I want an accomplice. If your idea of being an ally is just saying you're an ally but not actually doing anything to be helpful or understanding, then shut the fuck up.

im an ally! i firmly believe that having a disability is fine! just as long as you pretend you're normal for my convenience so you can fade into my peripheral vision. if you are visibly disabled and make me uncomfortable you're one of the bad ones who can't just suck it up and i don't support you. but im an ally!

God, don't get me started on the unholy shit they are shoving in our faces with AI in the blind community right now. It fucking sucks so hard. The attempts at AI audio description are shit at best, I would much rather have a bored human narrator. And the scamming, god the things that say it's AI for the blind but it's really just preying on a vulnerable population in even worse ways than it already preys on everyone else. Mostly though it's just an excuse for people to be even less caring about the needs of others than they already were.

... I have feelings about AI that's targeted at the blind. XD

They could be training AI to do something useful like automate Audio Description For the Blind, but they're using it on stupid shit like drawing people with seven fingers on one hand

Anybody know if there's a way to make Instagram stop trying to describe images in the shittiest way possible? Sometimes I can't read a post at all because their crappy AI alt text starts trying to read an entire calendar or an aesthetically chosen old time newspaper article that's skewed to the side just enough that it starts speaking in Russian and Will Not let me read what the post actually is until it is done mangling the photo above

"Pride month is over"

WRONG! Your pride month is over! Me and all the other disabled queers are having pride month two: disability edition

What’s Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS), and why do so many autistic people have it?

I learned about this the other day, when I posted about palinopsia (visual trailing/afterimages) being common in autistic people, and a couple of our followers told me about their VSS. I did some more research, and discovered that I also have it.

Visual Snow Syndrome is a neurological condition that interferes with visual processing. It’s caused by hyperactivity and hyper-excitability of nerves in certain areas of the brain that process visual information.

The core feature of VSS is constantly seeing tiny, fuzzy “feedback” in the environment. It’s kind of like seeing the world through a staticky TV screen. Some people’s visual static is larger than others. Mine is relatively fine-grained, but it gets bigger and more obvious in low lighting.

Some of the other symptoms of VSS include:

Palinopsia (visual trailing/afterimages)

Photophobia (sensitivity to light)

Increased and enhanced ectopic phenomenon, such as floaters, phosphenes, and Scheerer’s phenomenon

Seeing glare, starbursts, and halos around lights

Difficulty seeing at night/in the dark

Seeing random flashes of light and/or color, without cause from the environment

It’s common for people with VSS to experience comorbid migraines, but VSS is not the same thing as migraine aura.

So, why do autistic people often have VSS?

It comes down to the fact that VSS is caused by the hyper-excitability of neurons in areas of the brain that process visual information. A core feature of autism is hyper-excitable neurons, especially in areas of the brain that have to do with sensory processing. So it makes sense that autism would often inadvertently cause VSS.

Here are some illustrations of visual phenomenon that VSS causes, in case you want a better understanding of what the world looks like for me and many other autistic people.

Visual snow/static:

Palinopsia/image trailing:

Scheerer’s Phenomenon (tiny bright moving dots):

Starbursts around lights:

Floaters:

I hope y’all have learned something :)

I’ve found it very intriguing to realize that the way I see the world is more unique than I once knew!

~Eden🐢

Another "hot damn that's some blindness you got going on there" moment: watching a vod of a Tomb Raider Remaster speedrun and not being able to tell if these are the new graphics or old until I see a blue skybox somewhere. XD

There badly needs to be a way to have post tags automatically expanded. It's a bitch and a half to see them in the Tumblr app with a screen reader (much like most things in this app when using a screen reader; I will pay for this hell site when they implement basic accessibility and not a moment sooner).

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.

A really great interview with someone who does audio descriptions and the thoughts of some blind folks about text to speech AD (hint: we all kind of hate it as w community; human voices are best for describing human art!).

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).

hi! I'm at work right now and I wanted to ask an accessibility question:

with regards to screen readers, does a hyphen get read out differently than a minus sign? i.e. on a traditional qwerty keyboard, does the one beside the 0 sound different to the one on the numpad?

I'm on my phone at the moment but hyphen and minus were read as such. Zero on the numbers row and num pad is always zero unless you have num lock off, in which case it's (I think) the enter key. With JAWS (the screen reader, not the shark) zero on the num pad is the "JAWS key" which allows a lot of screen reader specific functions. I think it may also be the same with NVDA, which is free to download if you wanna mess with a pc screen reader. :)

Oh wait, you were talking about the minus sign! XD I thiiiiiink it's still read as minus when the num pad is locked. It's something else when the num pad is unlocked and you would think I would know what it was given how many times I erroniously hit the damn thing today but I don't. XD

It’s not dumb. :)

A screen reader interprets them differently, yeah. Only a hyphen is a hyphen. The minus symbol is the same whether you use the numbers row or the num pad for it.

hi! I'm at work right now and I wanted to ask an accessibility question:

with regards to screen readers, does a hyphen get read out differently than a minus sign? i.e. on a traditional qwerty keyboard, does the one beside the 0 sound different to the one on the numpad?

I'm on my phone at the moment but hyphen and minus were read as such. Zero on the numbers row and num pad is always zero unless you have num lock off, in which case it's (I think) the enter key. With JAWS (the screen reader, not the shark) zero on the num pad is the "JAWS key" which allows a lot of screen reader specific functions. I think it may also be the same with NVDA, which is free to download if you wanna mess with a pc screen reader. :)

Oh wait, you were talking about the minus sign! XD I thiiiiiink it's still read as minus when the num pad is locked. It's something else when the num pad is unlocked and you would think I would know what it was given how many times I erroniously hit the damn thing today but I don't. XD

I finished high school at a school for the blind and our local fire department went one much farther. They brought in two wrecked cars and not only had some of the students play the part of crash victims, they did very realistic makeup and prosthetics. My roommate had a mock broken leg with fake bone sticking out. It was gruesome but frankly quite awesome. XD

please i'm trying to figure out if my high school's administration was insane or something.

Sometimes it blows my mind that there are people that don’t wear glasses/contacts. Like they can literally see with no aid. Like they wake up and just be out here seeing. What a wild concept.

I'm disabled. There's stuff I quite need when I go outside. Folding cane, dog bags, dog water bowl, car placard, reusable grocery bags because the only really cunty thing my awesome state governor has done was make single use plastic bags illegal so stores are charging for the only goddamn bags with handles now, etc.

@ people who carry bags everywhere what do you put in them what is there to bring other than chapstick, keys, phone and maybe a tampon why are you packing a suitcase to be outside for 5 hours

My god, whoever on @staff fixed the badge image descripments, THANK YOU! It was awful trying to read posts, especially by popular authors with a lot of badges, and get trapped in literally over a minute of "badge image badge image badge image..." when I couldn't get to my phone to skip it. That sucked so hard! Now it just says "three badges" or "sixteen badges" and it is so much nicer! Thank you for fixing that!

Please, for the love of god alt text writers, STOP putting links in your alt text!!! It does nothing helpful, gets in the way of actually describing things, blocks screen readers from reading any real text, they can't be clicked on, it's just the worst! Alt text is for DESCRIBING what is going on in your image and nothing else!