[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[ydhsbhsnf-deactivated20210613]

hey y'all unfriendly reminder that "psychotic" does not mean "someone who is scary and violent" it means "someone who experiences psychosis" and to conflate the two is ableist

[traumadrauma]

hey y’all wanna talk about a lesser talked about trauma effect?

loss of autonomy.

not knowing how to do anything without explicit permission or instruction.

feeling like you’ll get in trouble if you do anything on your own will.

waiting until you’re given permission to do so much as eat.

not feeling like your body is your own.

if you experience this you aren’t broken or alone. you were abused and traumatized and conditioned to be like this. remember you belong to nobody but yourself. you are and will be okay.

[lightheartedsuggestion]

What’s going to make you happy right now? Is it some cake? Is it a nap? Is it calling your mom? Is it going on a drive and blasting music? Is it taking a bath? Is it reading a book?

Check in with yourself because you deserve that happiness, whatever it is.

[thecatwhowalksbyherself-deactiv]

I use this with my hospice patients a lot. Because "is there anything I can do to help?" rarely gets a response. But, "I'll be here till 6:30 and would like to do one thing to make your room more comfortable before I head out" frequently does get an answer. Often something they deem "too small to bug anyone with" like closing the blinds so there's no reflection on the tv, or repositioning their socks because the heels have wandered into the front and are uncomfortable, or they want ice cream before dinner today, or getting an extra blanket.

I also use this on myself. What's one thing I could do to make my environment more comfortable right now? Does it cure my mental illness? Hell no! Does it make me feel more in control of my feelings and the world around me? You betcha!

[adhdpie]

7 most adhd moods

–the Only Mood everyone else knows about: i  wanna do THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and–SQUIRREL

–galaxy brain: i was listening to the lecture but the prof said something that reminded me of something else and now i’m not sure how much time i was lost in thought

–the tutorial only comes in video format: i’m sorry, but you’ve thrown off the emperor’s groove *hurls product & its tutorial video into the sun*

–damn you hyperfocus: i went to bed intending to wake up and write but this morning i was possessed by a cleanliness spirit and spent the next 14 hours organizing the apartment

–i dont think u tried at all.jpg: did i seriously spend an entire free day refreshing twitter b/c i didn’t want to spend 10 minutes finishing my hw but wouldn’t let myself do anything else until i finished it???? (yes)

–patrick star: *unlocks phone* time to check the weather. *opens twitter* the weather. *opens messenger* the weather. *opens mobage game* the weather. *opens facebook* the weather. *opens twitter again* THE WEA–

–smells like depression: literally everything is too boring. i’m going back to sleep

[abcsofadhd]

(Source: me)

[actuallyblind]

[Image: tweet by Titanium Cranium (@FelicityTC) including three screenshots of a Harry potter book in three different formats on Amazon. Text:

“Harry Potter on Amazon -

Print: $6.39 Audio: $44.99 Braille: $100.00

#CripTax”]

[kimboo-york]

So, let me explain this a bit.

The defenders of CripTax prices will say that those prices cover the cost of production. This is, without a doubt, true. I work at a university where we often have to take written materials and convert them into braille – it takes a LOT of people hours, special software, and a braille embosser.

But those defenders of higher prices are reversing the argument to justify fleecing disabled readers.

What do I mean by that?

Braille is not magic. It is done by taking plain text and feeding it through fairly affordable translation software, creating a document that can easily be printed in braille.

All that time and effort and special software? IS NOT FOR THE BRAILLE.

It is to take the document provided by the publisher (usually in PDF format, the same file they send to the printers) and turn it into plain, unadorned text, by hand. Text has to be “stripped” (OCR/text recognition); images have to be described; footnotes have to be embedded; special pullouts and other formatting shifted or removed. 

Printing in braille is cheap; reverse engineering a finished text to print it in braille IS NOT.

Same with those audio books. After a book is completed and, often, after it has already been published, the publisher arranges to have the book recorded by a professional voice actor/reader, which usually also involves a recording producer, if not a recording studio, which all stacks up to $$, no two ways about it.

However: that cost? IS RARELY FACTORED INTO THE BUDGET OF PRINTING A BOOK.

Oh, it might be, if the author is JK Rowling and it is well known that readers will want audio versions right away. But most of the time, nope, the audio book is produced only after the hard copy book has become a decent seller, and so it’s an extra cost which is claimed must be covered by making the audio version extra expensive to buy. (Even then it’s somewhat ridiculous, since honestly, creating an audio book is, in the end, cheaper than printing, factoring in the cost of paper.)

If publishers factored audio book production into the assumed costs of publishing a book, they would have very little reason to price it higher.

If publishers factored in creating a “plain text” file – including having editors/authors describe images – that could be used to print braille copies or to be used with refreshable braille readers (electronic pinboards, basically), then there would be zero reason to price those books higher.

tl;dr: Yes, it’s a #criptax, and the excuse that “those formats are more expensive to produce so they have to be priced higher” is only true if you completely throw out the premise that publishers have an obligation to account for disabled readers when they are actually budgeting for and publishing the book.

[actuallyblind]

I’m really glad you brought this up, because this is exactly the sort of argument thatpeople try to use to justify inaccessibility in all kinds of areas. When we tell a company that their website or appliance or piece of technology isn’t accessible, they frequently tell us that they are sorry to hear that but that the accessibility is too expensive and time-consuming to add in now. There is also a provision in the law that allows companies to not bother including accessibility in their products if the cost of building in the accessibility is more than 5% of the total cost to build the whole product in the US.

That seems reasonable on the surface, doesn’t it? Except here’s the thing—the accessibility should have been a part of the original plans to begin with and designed in from the very beginning and should have been considered a necessary element and just another ordinary part of the cost of producing the product, not some extra feature that can be opted out of if it’s too expensive. The problem is that these companies do not understand the fact that if you cannot afford to build the product with the accessibility included, then you cannot afford to build the product and that is that. It’s exactly the same as not being able to afford to make the product with all elements up to safety and health codes and standards. If you can’t afford to meet the legal standards, then you can’t afford to make the product, and it’s that simple. Accessibility is not an exception to this and it should not be considered as such. It should be just as much an ordinary required part of the design process as any other element, not an extra, shiny, fancy feature that you can just choose not to bother with if it costs a little bit of money.

Accessibility should be part of the standard design process just as much as safety codes and health standards and other legal regulations. The ADA has existed for 20 years so companies have had ample time to catch up and learn to plan for accessibility from the beginning as a part of the standard required design process. If you can’t afford to create the product fully up to code, standards, and accessibility laws, then you simply can’t afford to make the product. No excuses, no exceptions.

[andreashettle]

I have often said that, very often, the high cost of disability accessibility is not actually for the accessibility itself. The actual high cost is often due to the lack of foresight and planning for accessibility from the design stage onwards.

Let me explain what I mean with an example. Take accessibility in a building. Usually making a building accessible means you need things like braille signage, ramps to entrances, wide doorways that leave plenty of room for a wheelchair to pass through, and so forth. If you design a new building from scratch to incorporate all of these design elements from the beginning, literally before the building is a hole in the ground, then the total cost of integrating accessible features into the building is less than one percent of the total cost of constructing that building.

On the other hand, if you don’t bother to account for the need for disability access and just build the building first, and then go, “oops, we didn’t design for accessibility”, then you will need to literally tear down parts of the building and reconstruct it from scratch. If this is your primary approach to accessibility, then of course the cost of accessibility may seem expensive. But it’s not actually the ramp or the wide door ways that are expensive. What is expensive is all the extra cost and effort of completely undoing parts of what you had already created wrongly so that you can recreate it correctly. In other words, the actual expense is the lack of planning ahead for accessibility.

This is the first I learned how books could be more cheaply accessible if this was planned for ahead of time. But it’s the same principle at work. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand all this and blame disabled people for wanting accessibility instead of blaming designers, architects, inventors and book publishers, and so forth, as well as the people responsible for contracting them, for having failed to consider the needs of disabled people when there was still time to integrate accessibility during the design and initial construction phase, when it could have been done cheaply.

What we need is for more designers, architects, inventors, book publishers, policy makers, program managers, and so forth to learn about the principles of universal design.

[hollowedskin]

keeping this in mind to have a plain text copy and image descriptions as i go for if i ever write a text based book.

[lysikan]

You don't speak for Low-functioning autistics

Not-autistic people use this line a lot when trying to devalue the statements of autistic people that they deem as “high functioning”.

So, as one of those “low functioning” people they point at as counter-examples, I am standing up and saying “yes they do.”

I do not speak, I do not understand when you speak. Remember you said “those people who cannot speak” as evidence of the label.

I need help going potty. I am not proud of it, but it’s a fact of life. I need to pee just as often as you do, but my body doesn’t tell my brain that, so sometimes my pants get wet when I remember to put them on. That makes me low functioning by your standards. Remember - you said “those people that need help going to the bathroom” as evidence of the label.

I cannot make reasonable decisions about finances. I spend hundreds of dollars a month on an Internet site that gives me a virtual world in which to have friends because in the physical world people scare the poop out of me (see previous point about why that is a bad thing). Remember - you said “those people who can’t handle finances for themselves” as evidence of the label.

I need 24/7 care so I don’t hurt myself by accident because I forget what I am doing while I am doing it, such as cutting an onion with a sharp knife and wave my hand with the knife still in it. Remember you said “those people who need round the clock care” as evidence of the label.

Yup - I fit your bullet list of low functioning.

I don’t post arguments against your ableism and attacks on autistic people. Not because I agree with you but because fighting hurts me. When you claim I need to be “cured”, I do not call you out and say mean things about you because being confrontational hurts me, not because you are right.

You are not speaking for me in my silence, you are speaking over me. I want to tell you what an ass you are but my head won’t let me fight because it HURTS for me to argue.

While your head lets you be an ass and say untrue things, my head won’t let me. I must always be honest AND I must also maintain calm or I might get violent. This does not prove your point, it only silences me. Silencing me does not mean you are right, it only means you are more willing to be an ass than I am.

The “high functioning” autistics that argue for rights for me DO speak for me. In ways I cannot fight they defend me. In places I cannot go because of my fears, they stand for me. In groups that scare the poop out of me, they clean up the mess for me and stand for me.

You, who are not autistic, do not stand for me. Do not tell those that are capable of fighting your hate that they do not speak for me. They do.

[butterflyinthewell]

Dismissing an autistic advocate as “not autistic enough” because they can type or communicate understandably is a missed opportunity to gain insight about autism. It’s a disservice to autistic people who can’t understandably communicate their internal experiences.

Dismissing an autistic advocate because their described internal experiences don’t fit the tragedy narrative you’ve built your nonverbal autistic child’s life on is an even greater disservice.

No two autistic people are exactly alike, but autistic people know what being autistic is really like. A neurotypical can only guess what it’s like, and they often guess wrong.

Please stop making us the sidekicks in our own stories.

[coffee-alien]

“Imagine having a child that refuses to hug you or even look you in the eyes”

Imagine being shamed, as a child, for not showing affection in a way that is unnatural or even painful for you. Imagine being forced, as a child, to show affection in a way that is unnatural or even painful for you. Imagine being told, as a child, that your ways of expressing affection weren’t good enough. Imagine being taught, as a child, to associate physical affection with pain and coercion.

[samayla]

As a preschool special ed para, this is very important to me. All my kids have their own ways of showing affection that are just as meaningful to them as a hug or eye contact is to you or me. 

One gently squeezes my hand between both of his palms as he says “squish.” I reciprocate. When he looks like he’s feeling sad or lost, I ask if I can squish him, and he will show me where I can squish him. Sometimes it’s almost like a hug, but most of the time, it’s just a hand or an arm I press between my palms. Then he squishes my hand in return, says “squish,” and moves on. He will come ask for squishes now, when he recognizes that he needs them.

Another boy smiles and sticks his chin out at me, and if he’s really excited, he’ll lean his whole body toward me. The first time he finally won a game at circle time, he got so excited he even ran over and bumped chins with me. He now does it when he sees me outside of school too. I stick out my chin to acknowledge him, and he grins and runs over and I lean down for a chin bump.

Yet another child swings my hand really fast. At a time when another child would be seeking a hug, she stands beside me and holds my hand, and swings it back and forth, with a smile if I’m lucky. The look on her face when I initiate the hand swinging is priceless.

Another one bumps his hip against mine when he walks by in the hallway or on the playground, or when he gets up after I’m done working with him. No eye contact, no words, but he goes out of his way to “crash” into me, and I tell him that it’s good to see him. He now loves to crash into me when I’m least expecting it. He doesn’t want anything, really. Just a bump to say “Hi, I appreciate you’re here.” And when he’s upset and we have to take a break, I’ll bump him, ask if he needs to take a walk, and we just go wander for a bit and discuss whatever’s wrong, and he’s practically glued to my side. Then one more bump before we go back into the room to face the problem.

Moral of the story is, alternative affection is just as valid and vitally important as traditional affection. Reciprocating alternative affection is just as valid and vitally important as returning a hug. That is how you build connections with these children. 

[brighteyedbadwolf]

This is so goddamn important.

I verbally express affection. A LOT.

My husband… doesn’t. I don’t know why. For the longest time part of me wondered if it meant he loved me less.

At some point I told him about a thing I had done as a kid. Holding hands, three squeezes means ‘I Love You’.

Suddenly he’s telling me I Love You all the time.

Holding my hand, obviously, but also randomly.

taptaptap

on my hand, my shoulder, my butt, my knee, whatever body part is closest to him, with whatever part of him is closest to me

All the time.

More often than I ever verbally said it.

It’s an ingrained signal now, I can tap three times on whatever part of him, and get three taps back in his sleep. Apparently I do the same.

It’s made a huge difference for us.

People say things differently.

[rottenbutrecovering]

[This user has memory issues due to past abuse]

[cassderolo-deactivated20181006]

can 2017 be the year of hearies being Good Allies to d/Deaf people?

[cassderolo-deactivated20181006]

how to be a good ally to d/Deaf people

recognize that audism (the oppression of & discrimination against deaf people) is still a very real issue. it can include things like believing that deaf people are “stupid” or “broken” and that deaf people need to be “fixed” (aka made hearing), as well a general lack of awareness about deaf issues, how deaf people communicate, or even that deaf people exist

recognize the consequences of audism, like deaf children being forced to speak and not being allowed to learn ASL, deaf people being denied jobs (yep, its illegal. still happens), and even deadly police brutality 

reblog/signal boost posts about d/Deaf issues as well as positive posts about d/Deaf accomplishments, information about d/Deaf people, etc

if you can: learn a little bit of your local sign language! even just fingerspelling and knowing a few basic signs. i especially encourage anyone who works in customer service/retail to learn a little ASL if at all possible! (this is a big thing so i def don’t fault anyone for not doing it, but if you have the time/ability it’s a pretty cool thing to do)

stop using phrases like “falls on deaf ears”, “deaf to their pleas”, anything that frames deafness in a negative way

recognize that there are different levels of hearing loss!! hearing people generally categorize hearing as: “not being able to hear perfectly but still hearing” = hard of hearing; “not hearing anything” = deaf; but for deaf people, anyone with any degree of hearing loss is considered deaf! if someone tells you they’re deaf but you know they can talk/sing/play instruments/listen to music, believe them

theres a lot more honestly but i dont wanna let this get too long!! anyone can feel free to message me about any of this/if u wanna hear more. i’d really appreciate if people (esp. hearing people) could reblog this

[strangerdarkerbetter]

To all the autistics who are relearning how to stim…

It’s ok if you’re embarrassed to stim in public

It’s ok if you need to try out a whole bunch of different stims to figure out what works for you

It’s ok if you’re self-conscious about your stimming

The more you stim, the more comfortable you will become

One day you will find yourself stimming in public and not caring

One day you will find that your stims flow naturally

One day you will be able to appreciate the beauty of your stimming

And it’s ok if that day isn’t today. 

No matter how comfortable or uncomfortable you are stimming, you are valid and deserve the best. Keep embracing your natural ways of being. 

[dailyautismcauses]

[feldfrowe]

More hearing people should learn some sign language so here are some actually useful signs for us hearing people to learn.

[disabilityuserboxes]

this user is pro self diagnosis 

[gotthatmoxie]

I saw this sign and totally cracked up.