11:40pm August 2, 2013

this is a reply to feliscorvus and josiahd

Yeah.

And I can’t see how anyone can ignore the fact that some people actively say “If you don’t write image descriptions on every single image you post, it means you don’t care enough to include visually impaired people.”

And think that this has no effect on people who can’t always post image descriptions due to disability related reasons.

Especially maddening about that conversation?

I’m visually impaired. I’m not blind. But I have severe visual processing issues enough that doctors have occasionally, without even asking me, checked the “low vision” checkbox on disability forms.

This includes:

* Scrambled and fragmented visual input

* All kinds of weird patterns that appear over the top of things, my neurologist thinks it may be status migraine aura.

* Double vision due to neuromuscular problems

* Tracking difficulties

* Trouble identifying what I’m seeing. As in, I’ll see colors and shapes and textures but not tables and chairs and curtains.

* Difficulty reading and difficulty understanding what I read. Also sometimes letters just look like squiggles. Or sometimes I can identify them as symbols, but the area of my brain necessary to process their meaning crashes and leaves me only with an explosion of cognitive pain every time I look at them.

* Trouble telling the difference between moving and stationary objects.

* Trouble with depth perception.

* A tendency to only notice pieces of things, or to single out things matching a certain visual description and lose track of other things.

* I can’t safely cross streets.  I fail to see cars that are coming straight at me.

* I see so much detail that it overwhelms my ability to understand what I’m seeing.

*  Everything is always too bright to the point of  pain.

* And vision is cross wired with several other senses.

Sometimes these problems are worse than others. And they range from things that are wrong with my eyes, to cognitive difficulties involving the processing of what I’d seen with my eyes.

I do best with tactile and kinesthetic feedback. I have problems with hearing that resemble my problems with vision, but vision remains my most severely impaired sense despite having visual acuity that’s technically okayish once corrected.

I’m not deaf or blind, but I frequently experience what Donna Williams refers to as meaning-deafness and meaning-blindness  An inability to comprehend what I see and hear. 

What I do get out of visual information is often vastly different from what other people get out of it. My image descriptions do not reflect what I see, they reflect how I’ve been taught to describe things.

And all these visual problems?  Mean that when I can, I frequently use a screen reader and other accessibility features designed for people with visual impairments. I’ve had to do this even when such things were very difficult to use, such as using emacspeak with a text web browser. I’m not in the same boat as someone who needs to always use such tools, but sometimes I’ve used them for weeks at a time. Which means I’ve always been aware why image descriptions are necessary, and have done my best to include them since a time when that meant hand editing alt text.

I also happen to have language problems that are as complicated and involved as my visual processing problems.

If the internet allowed, I’d be posting things that were purely tactile and kinesthetic. Those things, along with color, are a huge part of how I experience the world without words.

But I can’t do that, so I post pictures.

Whenever I can do so, and can do do without causing harm to myself, I post image descriptions.

My ability to post them depends on how I’m feeling overall, how my language skills are doing in a variety of very specific areas, how my visual processing is doing, and the nature of the specific image. It also has to do with whether the spoons used on the description, are going to take away from things vital to my health and well being.

It does not have to do with not caring about shutting out screen reader users. A category of people that sometimes includes MYSELF.

(I’m noticing that nobody seems to think that anyone who talks about this might just use screen readers or text only browsers themselves. I use both.)

My abilities fluctuate. Sometimes I can’t do words at all. Sometimes only words. Sometimes I use pictures to communicate, other times I can’t process visual information at all. Often, it’s a confusing mix of in between states.

But this is one reason these conversations are so confusing and distressing to me. It’s like everywhere I turn, people like me don’t even exist in the discussion.

And people want everything to be so absolute. To have rules. Things don’t work like that.

But you can’t make absolute statements about what it means when someone doesn’t (or doesn’t always) use image descriptions, without affecting people who have disability-related difficulty writing image descriptions.

In a less ideology driven world, people would be looking for solutions. I’ve seen it done on a forum where a variety of people had a variety of conflicting expressive and receptive communication difficulties.

If a person has trouble understanding someone, they would say so.

If that person could change their writing to make it better understood, they would.

If they couldn’t, they would say so.

At which point anyone willing and able would step in and attempt to translate.

I was also in other forums where…

There were major flame wars over similar issues.

People with unusual language usage of all kinds (overly verbose, overly terse, large vocabulary, tiny vocabulary, unusual grammar, etc.) were being castigated for not writing in a way other people could understand.

People with language comprehension issues were being castigated for not being “accepting enough” of unusual language styles.

Both sides accused the other of not trying hard enough, not caring, not accepting unusual cognitive styles, ableism, being difficult for its own sake, etc. And lots more.

Those of us from the other forum brought up our translation solution but were told that would be “hand holding” which would be unacceptable.

I can tell you which approach o strongly prefer.

I AM NOT saying that people FULLY CAPABLE of writing image descriptions with no harm to themselves, should be able to get away with not writing them. I am not saying that it is not ableist for image descriptions not to exist in most places. I am and always have been a strong supporter of alt text and image descriptions and have been since long before most people even heard about it. Partially because I’m frequently AN ACTUAL USER of screen readers and text only browsers, and other times sometimes find text easier to comprehend then images.

So don’t even go there with me, it’s a waste of time and I’m not having pointless fruitless conversations.

What I am saying is that conflicting access needs exist. Sometimes, as with me, even in the same person.

Some examples of in the same person:

* I’m a part time screen reader user due to visual impairments, and I frequently have to post images minus descriptions.

* My expressive vocabulary is a good deal bigger than my receptive vocabulary. I literally can’t understand the words I write.

* I often write while unable to read.

* I often can only write very long things, but I have trouble reading and comprehending very long things 

And if those conflicts can occur within the same person, they can occur within different people.

I’m far more interested in looking for and implementing solutions, than talking about who is shut out more than who else. At least for right now, in this context.

Because it’s clear that overall, people who use screen readers are shut out by a lack of image descriptions. And it’s also clear that in many disability circles, simplistic ideas about how easy it is to provide image descriptions, shut many cognitively disabled people out in ways that mirror ways we’ve been shut out over our lifetimes.  People aren’t usually meaning to shut others out, but it happens anyway.  In both instances. And in both instances it’s real and harmful.

But the best thing to do in these confusing situations where the access needs and abilities of several different sorts of people are conflicting, is to start looking around for what to do about that.

I really liked the solutions found by that group of autistic people with such varied cognitive and communication abilities. Instead of making the solution the responsibility of individuals acting in isolation, it made the solution the responsibility of the group overall. Instead of endlessly pointing fingers back and forth, everyone worked together and cooperated.

This was a group where everyone was disabled and everyone had experienced communication problems. And so everyone knew that everyone was acting in good faith and understood what it meant to be shut out on the basis of communication.

And the most important part, to me? Nobody demanded of anyone else things that they could not do.  Nobody even demanded that people do things they found too difficult.

(I have a terrible memory from one of the other forums. A woman from the first forum came into this other forum. She made the mistake of saying that she felt most comfortable using language the way she did. That she could write in more standard ways buy that it was difficult and didn’t feel like “her”.  Two men tore her to shreds and twisted her words, saying she’d admitted that he language problems were merely a choice, and deserved no accommodation.  Nothing showed the difference between the forums more than this.)

The first forum did not ask what people could not give. It drew on the unique strengths of each member to find solutions that ensured nobody was shut out. Everyone did what we could.  We succeeded.

Far more interested in working out those solutions, than fighting over who has it worse.

.

11 notes