Accesibility - Blog Posts

Writing Accessibility PSA

Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!

Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?

A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.

Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!

I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]

Please stop trigger tagging with #epilepsy tw/cw/warning/etc.

I need every single person to understand how horrible tumblr’s tagging system is

I go into the tag for epilepsy and its all flashing lights. We can’t use our own tag because people without epilepsy fill it up with improper warnings.

Use ‘flashing’ in place of ‘epilepsy’ in your tags. You aren’t warning people of epileptics, you’re warning us of flashing lights. Please please tag properly. Epileptics say this endlessly and constantly and it’s ignored. You are risking lives by doing this.

Here’s proof of what I mean:

THIS POST IS 100% OKAY TO REBLOG, I ENCOURAGE PEOPLE WITHOUT EPILEPSY TO ESPECIALLY DO SO!

Shoutout to all the kind strangers who make things more accessible for people like me

I showed up for my covid vaccination appointment at my pharmacy, and where to check-in was very unclear. I joined the back of one of the lines and stood there trying to figure it out for a bit, before asking a Latino family standing nearby, "Hi, could you tell me where the vaccination check-in is? I'm very confused."

They showed me to the right window and afterwards, when I was confused again about where I needed to go, explained each of the subsequent steps and what I needed to do for each one.

I appreciate them more than they know. Being autistic, I need clear directions and freeze when I don't know what to do, which made the appointment very frustrating at first. I asked for help, and that family helped me. It might have taken only a few minutes of their time, but they made my week.

I'm so grateful to them and everyone else who makes life accessible for me.

To all the kind strangers, thank you.