could you please start adding plaintext alternatives to your posts? sometimes all the bold text and italics that you use confuse my brain and make it harder for me to read. And im not even someone with a known visual processing disorder or anything like that, so i imagine its worse for someone with that. I'd really appreciate you making this blog more accessible, especially since you do such great work here
Did you know that I type like this as an accessibility feature? Because I do have visual processing issues, and I really struggle to parse undifferentiated text.
I have to copy and paste and add paragraph breaks and some differentiation to some of the asks I get just to be able to engage with them and understand what's being said.
I literally cannot engage with and understand my own writing if I don't write like this.
I recommend taking a screenshot and using an app to copy and paste the text elsewhere, which will automatically remove the stylization.
I understand and commiserate that it's annoying to have to take those extra steps, but I am not able to provide the plain text to every post myself because that just adds too many additional steps to my already long process, and I really just do not have the energy to:
Modify the ask for my own accessibility, then format my answer, often including looking up resources which I also might have to then make more accessible for myself, then post it, then screenshot it, send it to an app because Tumblr won't let me copy the text as one solid block, then repost it with the plain text.
I'm just one person with very limited energy, doing this for fun. I do not have to capacity to make my work accommodating to the vastly different needs of all people, but I wish I did.
Actually I wish the burden of accessibility fell on the multi-million dollar platform to give you a way to toggle the style on or off instead of being solely on the shoulders of each individual creator, but that's a rant for another time.
Please try to remember that accessibility is a wide umbrella and people often have conflicting needs. Lots of folks have tried to shame me for making my own writing more accessible to me (and others with this kind of visual processing issue) by implying that I'm ignoring accessibility by writing this way.
And I would appreciate if more folks would stop and consider the diversity of people's needs.
And then put more pressure on the platforms themselves to provide robust accessibility infrastructure for all of our varying needs instead of just getting mad at individual disabled people who cannot provide it all ourselves.
And I'm sorry if I sound defensive, but it is genuinely hurtful to be told that all the work that I am doing to support this form accessibility is opposing accessibility just because it can't support everyone at once. And ignoring that the form of accessibility you are asking for also does not support everyone at once.
Basically it's just frustrating to be asked to do three times the work to accommodate everyone instead of the platform being held responsible.
And it's especially upsetting to hear "the way you're accommodating your issues is wrong and bad and doesn't even count as accessibility."
So if my content is inaccessible to you, that's a shame. I wish there were more ways available to me to accommodate our conflicting needs.
