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blind to our privilege
I used to work for Comcast and one of my responsibilities was making sure their mobile apps passed their annual accessibility tests. The company faced enormous FCC fines for failure to pass these tests, but somehow the only person aware of this was me and I was only a contractor. Comcast has thousands of vice presidents of this and that, and one of them should have been on top of this stuff, but their turnover rate was so high that they never usually even lasted a year in one position, so it was up to me to explain the situation to each new one and try to convince them that it was even important.
You wouldn’t think that a person at that level would ever say “who cares about blind people?” but they almost all said that or something to that effect, until the reality of a million-dollars-per-month fine set in. They even at one point hired a vice president of accessibility – a man who was himself blind and obviously never said “who cares about blind people?” – but he quit after less than a year because of his frustration with getting the company to give a shit.
We are all the same height once we are fallen.
Everything is about the young and beautiful and exploited being overdriven or neglected so he/she becames a cripple. It is like the worst cult. The temple of disease. A serious and operational effort for self destruction. The only thing operational. The way of the modern life.
I am baffled how everything gets a solution, but these ones are swept under the rug. Then people go who wants a cripple in the penthouse.
I am also sad nobody made MK Jax like prostethics for an accessible price.
I was a CNA (for non-Americans, I was a trained nurse’s assistant) for the first 8 years or so of my adulthood. I worked in long-term care facilities, mostly Alzheimer’s and Dementia care units and psychiatric locked wards, but I worked in other wings too.
It was absolutely eye-opening. It was a rich, and at the same time immensely painful, experience for someone who had no disabilities and no firsthand experience with disabled family. I was proud to be a part of my patients’ lives (even when they were assholes about it), because they taught me some of the hardest and most important lessons I ever learned about humankind.
First and foremost, that it can and will happen to anyone and everyone.
No matter how careful, no matter how reckless, no matter how healthy, you will end up needing help. Accidents and disease do NOT give a flying fudge-flavored fuck about you, or the plans you made with your life, or the things you did and didn’t get to do.
Second, shut up about the "You're so inspiring!" bit. Shut up. Please.
Ablebodied people lionizing daily agony and begrudging survival can be part of what makes them end up bitter. It’s exhausting to be chronically ill, and sometimes what makes their day actually better is treating them like a normal, average god damn human. Talk about your day. Show interest in theirs. Express opinions. Share your gripes. Ask them for help with something. Tell a fart joke. Make eye contact. Smile. Something. Just don’t fucking ask about their oxygen tank or their wheelchair. They’re literally sick of it.
Third, don't touch their stuff. Ever.
Helping them without invitation is fucking assault. Professional caregivers give aid when invited or when the patient is incapacitated. Our focus should be on assisting with just the things they physically cannot do themselves. Let a human being have some god damn dignity. Moving their wheelchair because they were in your way or going slowly scares the fuck out of them and pisses them off. Picking up someone’s cane and moving it is a day-ruiner. Reorganizing pills is a great way to cause agony without meaning to. Don’t fucking do it unless they ask. They know their limits better than you, respect it.
Fourth, carpe diem. No regrets.
I spent long enough sitting and talking with people on their deathbed, listening to them weep about the things they missed doing. It was, invariably, spending more time with friends and family. Taking that trip. Making that phone call. Giving them that hug. Going on that spontaneous adventure. People who died alone in our care? We were the closest thing to a family they had. And we wept for them. I swore to myself, I would not die like that. I would remember the last lesson they got to teach to someone young.
End rant.
People move wheelchairs out of their way?! Jfc
Or try to ‘help’ when they see someone wheeling themself and just grab the handles uninvited. It’s rare. But common enough that literally every wheelchair user I know has had it happen to them at least once.
It’s assault. It’s unwanted contact. And if you try to move them and they fight back, or shout for help, it can even constitute kidnapping. There’s a reason disabled people buy shit like sword canes or wheelchair handle spikes.
That’s insane. I don’t understand people that don’t respect the agency of others. That’s like grabbing someone in front of you and shoving them through a door because they’re in your way.
Exactly the same idea, and the same indignation. It’s awful.
A dog taught me about crosswalk accessibility. I was walking someone’s blind dog, and we were waiting at the crosswalk. When the opposite side of the street started chirping when the light changed (as it always does), the dog started crossing the street toward the source of the sound before I ever indicated it was time to move. I’d never thought much about the chirping sound until then.
I was recently in a somewhat large city and was doing a bit of StreetComplete and it has a bunch of questions that try to figure how accessible a route is and I noticed how fucking bad it is. As it was a larger city there were at least those bumpers at traffic lights, which is not the norm everywhere in my experience, but that was about it. Sometimes the curb was lowered on one side so you could easily traverse it with a wheelchair etc. but it was only on one side of the road, the other side was at complete height (at least 15cm). This meant you might easily get on the road but head no way of properly getting of.
That’s one thing that struck me about the last time I was in the US. The cities are SO incredibly inaccessible. All the buildings need to be compliant, so once you make it through the door, you’re fine, but getting there is basically impossible for people with disabilities.
No sidewalks, almost no public transportation and where it exists, it’s impossible to get in or out. Cars can turn right on a red light in SO many places, so you can basically never know when you can safely cross what should be clear path.
Right on red could be OKish if majority of drivers followed even a fraction of road laws and made even a half attempt at stopping first, before looking, then finally starting the turn from a complete stop.
Could be, but won’t.
Fun fact: right turn on red came about in response to the oil crisis. It wasn’t legal by default before that. My local streets advocacy group wants a city no right on red law, but I don’t see how it’d happen in the current environment.
No sidewalks
There’s been a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that resulted in a consent decree forcing local governments to put in ADA-compliant ramps at intersections. But the lawsuit apparently didn’t also include the sidewalks themselves, so now there are useless “ADA ramps to nowhere” everywhere. It’s fucking infuriating!
Wow, that’s just… sad and infuriating.
The older and/or more rural the community, the worse it gets. Basically any building and infrastructure built after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities act (2001-ish) are more or less reasonable.
Anything before that, and you’re in for a bad time.
I had that experience as well, it also asks whether the traffic lights make a sound. I hear it all the time, never need it and never realised I might hear it all the time, I dont hear it at every crossing. Suddenly it felt so random whether or not it was doing the ticking or not.
I’ve recently been spending time somewhere that has street crossings that talk to you. Its annoying in a cute way to have a voice clearly say something to the effect of “the light to cross x street is lit, you may cross” (the annoying bit is that until it’s lit it says “wait” repeatedly)
I don’t need it, but if I did that’s exactly the sort I’d want. Its so clear! Zero confusion! I didn’t have to look up from my phone to cross the street! :p
You still should check! Lots of idiots out there.
In my city in Canada you need to hold the crossing button for like a second or two and then it’ll do the noise. Maybe that’s why it seems random? I know its easy to do by mistake
That’s a good one, the ones with a tactile thing require a touch whereas others are a physical buttons. It could be true that these need to be pushed longer for a sound. But at the same time, some make a sound when the light was red too. I’m gonna try it when i come across one of those kind of buttons.
The non ticky/beepy ones should have a tactile knob on the bottom of the box that spins when it’s safe to cross.
Some did, but most of the ones that had no sound had no tactile thing either. I expect the bussier center to have better coverage of accessible traffic lights, the experience I had was in a low traffic area on the outskirts of that town.
I find that people were a lot more helpful with old people back in the day. Now it’s seems we are just in the way and get bumped and jostled.
Ignored, mostly. Sometime between age 50 and 60, people started looking right through me.
I try to implement color-blind safe color palettes in my presentable work. Weird part is i started doing it after a color blind person was an ass to me for completely unrelated reasons.
Maybe I thought other color blind people are just humans and not represented by this guy.
This is why, if I want to upload an image that needs a circle drawing attention to some part of it, I use blue instead of red. Useless red circles become even more useless when someone struggles to see red, but the most common forms of color-blindness show a distinction for blue.
I have an app on my phone that simulates different types of color blindness (Chromatic Vision Simulator, or CVSimulator. Free, no ads, it just does the thing it’s designed to do.) Sometimes I use it to make art that can be accessible for people without a full range of color perception, or to make something that is designed specifically for them. Sometimes such limitations encourage creativity, and if it means more people can enjoy a piece, I’m all for it.
Don’t use color, use different line types. Hatching, cross hatching, zig zag, dotted line, dashed line.
Great advice! That sounds like a fun way to add character to an art piece too.
I will mention this becomes quite messy sometimes. But simpler charts absolutely. Line thickness and lightness can also be used but a surprising amount of software has insufficient rendering capability for these.
Yes a lot of software is absolute shit at support for the color blind or visually impaired. Even so called “508 compliant” applications are a joke. We validate our software where I work, and certify it to be 508 compliant since we have government customers. But it’s a complete joke. Just a formality and afterthought. Anyone actually trying to use it with accessibility tools would have a hell of a bad time. One reason I prefer Linux is the desktop and most apps tend to be a lot more configurable than other OSes. Which allows you more control over color and font size.
Interesting, what is the app called?
Its name is Chromatic Vision Simulator, or “CVSimulator.”
Playing games enough times with my RG colorblind friend, I am now livid when a game gives us color taska but doesn’t have a colorblind mode.
Or those puzzles that need to be solved through audio clues but closed captions aren’t available. (Don’t get me wrong subtitles are great but there is still a lot missing without cc - sadly most games don’t have them but it should be the standard.)
Myst is unsolvable for the deaf, isn’t it? There’s at least three audio-based puzzles in it.
Not just myst. Imagine spending days trying solve a puzzle, convinced you must be missing something. And when you finally get frustrated enough to look up the solution online you read something infuriating like “listen to your walking sounds, you are on the right path when you hear yourself walking on gravel” or “the portal is random, listen for the one that has music coming out of it.”
Ocarina of Time did that with the Lost Woods. A maze of mostly identical square rooms, at one point you’re supposed to listen for the doorway the music is coming from. On the N64 you could at least tell which entrances would lead back to Kokiri forest because there was a kind of glow in them, the 3DS port eliminated that AFAIK.
Had this the other day with my NAS!
Just for fun I tried the “locate disc” function, which supposedly changes the colour of the LED of the tray of the specific disc.
Only after manually finding the correct tray and starring at the LED for a couple of seconds I could see that it was slightly oranger compared to the others. I think.
I do hate the blinkinlights for that reason. Green? k. Amber? Not quite the same as green… is there a green nearby to compare? Orange? Different than amber, maybe? Red. K definitely not green.
People have always loved to rip on Windows, but Windows 95 and its follow-ons were designed to be fully usable by the blind and people with vision problems. Not just in the color choices but in how the various controls worked. There’s no way Windows 11 is still that useful as far as accessibility is concerned, though – it just has too many different fucked-up ways of presenting things.
I remember most the windows bashing that i heard started a little with XP, but much more significantly with Vista and later editions.
… am I a crazy person? Who actually stands in an elevator and thinks “the floor announcements sure do ruin my day” What is wrong with these people?
and the title of the post? wheelchair ramps were the problem? the fuck?
One example would be people on the autism spectrum who struggle with overstimulation from noises. Of course it’s more important to have them there for visually impaired people but it’s perfectly possible to find the sound annoying or even difficult and not be an asshole.
That’s the world we live in. I’m confident if you gave some people $100 for free, they’d get mad it wasn’t $200.
Some people are just under immeasurably inhumans amount of stress, to the point that anything could trigger just an irrational seething hatred for some small, random noise, or inconvenience, or whatever.
We were not meant to operate under the conditions that a lot of us slave away at each and every day, due to survival, obligation, duty, and more.
I live in a society where people get pissed that they have to take their headphones off in an airplane to explain emergency announcements.
On a related note, I want to plug an app that I have had installed on my phones for a few years called Be My Eyes. People with reduced/no vision use it to ask for help from a sighted person. I recommend everyone install it to help out!
As a sighted user, my experience goes like this. I get a phone call that is simultaneously ringing to several helpers’ devices. If I picked up first, I am connected to the helpee in a one-way video call. 1 I say hi, the helpee says hi, and they ask for help. I try to help them, and the helpee ends the call. It usually takes <5 min.
Here some of are the calls I’ve answered:
- A teacher wanted to sort “thank you” cards made by the students into piles by recipient.
- “Why did my washer not finish the cycle?” - I read the LEDs and knob positions to determine that it hadn’t drained, and suggested settings to run a quick drain cycle.
- “What is my clothes dryer set to?” - I described the two knobs and listed their options in order, and confirmed their current settings.
- “Which vitamin bottle is which, and what is the dosage?” - I asked them to move the camera and bottles so I could read the labels.
1 If I don’t pick up, it will keep ringing the other helpers until it finds someone. I assume there’s some logic that picks helpers based on how often they have picked up, because once I finally answered a call in time, I started getting more.
I watched a movie where a blind girl used that to navigate around her house to escape a home invader. Didn’t realize it was real
Fascinating! Do you recall the name?
I had to do some searching, it’s called “see for me” .
I only had one encounter with Be My Eyes of someone trying to classify their comic book collection by the year printed on the cover which was too small for them to read. It was pretty neat and I was happy to help, but it took way longer than 5 minutes, haha. I think though that with computer vision, a lot of the requests aren’t routed to volunteers anymore though.
Where I am, there’s a requirement for 15% (I believe) of new condo developments to meet accessibility standards. You wouldn’t believe how people—potential buyers, not developers—are against that, saying it’s too many. That’s just new developments. All the existing old stock is not accessible, so that percentage of total accessible living spaces is, actually, still tiny. But it’s still too much to accommodate accessibility.
Literally everyone is one accident, illness, or old age away from being disabled in some way. I can’t believe how stupid and short-sighted people are. (Maybe that’s their disability.)
Literally everyone is one accident, illness, or old age away from being disabled in some way.
yeah I was surprised to come across the statistic that in the UK about quarter of the population has some kind of disability (defined as “a physical or mental health condition or illness that has lasted or is expected to last 12 months or more, and which condition and/or illness reduces their ability to carry out day-to-day activities”)
Where I am, there’s a requirement for 15% (I believe) of new condo developments to meet accessibility standards. You wouldn’t believe how people—potential buyers, not developers—are against that…
I’m against that!
It should be 100%. There’s no excuse not to use universal design principles in every new building.
I kind of get it, in a tiny flat, making everything wheelchair accessible means objectively worse space usage for a non disabled person.
Solution is to just not buy it if you don’t like it though.
I was just thinking about the student apartments I lived in. They were 2-storey with wooden staircases up to the second floor. They were built in 4-apartment units; so figure the left apartment is mirrored on the right, with a mirrored pair stacked on top. These were 50% wheelchair accessible, to make them 100% you’d have to install like 16 2-storey elevators. Again this is student housing, they had some deal where you had to prove enrollment in a college or university to take out a lease, and so they had pretty quick tenant turnover. So what you do is fill up the second floor first, keeping spots open on the ground floor for disabled students as much as practicable.
I sometimes go around with a pram. Prams you can lift up and down stairs if needed, but you’d rather avoid it. It’s a quick and painless way to become more mindful of the accessibility of the environment around you.
I am also staunchly against “anti-homeless” architecture. People might need to lay down! Let them. And set up programs against homelessness, not against homeless people.
I was recently noticing how the newest wave of hostile architecture has changed as I walked around my city.
In the past couple of decades, anti-homeless architecture became so profoundly hostile that it was almost unusable even for its intended purpose.
Benches so sloped you couldn’t sit on them at all. Spikes sticking out of everything. It became obvious to anyone that the whole purpose of the furniture was to be unusable, that it existed only through spite.
Everyone hated it.
And so the latest generation of hostile architecture has now “evolved”. It’s hostile but only subtly so, in a way where most people might not notice.
Things like trendy wooden slatting instead of anti-skate spikes. Benches that look and feel normal to sit on, but are intentionally just a little too short to lay down on.
We could fix homelessness, but instead an incredible amount of effort has been poured into refining and “perfecting” hostile architecture so it achieves the purpose of deterring homeless people, but in a subtle way that conceals its true purpose.
Out of sight, out of mind.
We could fix homelessness, but instead an incredible amount of effort has been poured into refining and “perfecting” hostile architecture so it achieves the purpose of deterring homeless people, but in a subtle way that conceals its true purpose.
All the money spent on hostile anti-homeless shit could have solved homelessness 3 times over.
But that’ll never happen in america, at least, because when it comes to punishing people… there is no end of the money, but when it comes to helping people… oh my god the pearl clutching and hand clasping that follows about money.
Sorry to be that person, but in which way is this a meme??
When communities for a more or less general topic become too big they become an everything community, unless mods are really strict. It happened a lot on Reddit.
Someday you will grow old and realize why people sometimes make off topic posts in the meme community.
I wasn’t annoyed by them before, but I definitely found myself VERY appreciative of wheelchair accessible automatic doors when I broke my foot last year. I was on crutches, but still.
It was a weird new experience for me, being forced to not do something. Not because someone was stopping me, but because I physically couldn’t do it. Simple stuff , like taking the trash with the stairs. Weird.