#accesibility

[curlyhaircripplegf]

Hot take it’s not actually accessible if I have to ask an abled body person for help or assistance

[nondivisable]

look accessibility can and will be contradictory

I love a high toilet seat bc it means in don't have to put effort in with my legs, but people doing a chair transfer might hate it

an audio transcript at the end of a video might make it annoying for people using a screen reader

loud music for hoh people might make an event inaccessible for people with noise sensitivity

speaking longly and specifically for people who struggle with tone might make your message confusing for people with cognitive disabilities

and the list goes on

but if you never start making your life and content accessible, then you're not helping anyone either. there's not a golden rule of accessibility but if you don't even put in an effort, that's when you become an asshole

[whereserpentswalk]

I have decided to become a walkablity extremist.

Cars should not be allowed in towns and cities at all. The only places where they should be at all present is in rural areas where any other means of transportation should be impossible.

High speed rail networks should allow for a trip from Mexico city to Montreal in under 24 hours.

All public transportation should be 100% free.

Lawns should not exist.

It doesn't make sense for single family homes to be built in most American cities.

Architecture must be beautiful again.

Every commercial street should have at least one bench.

Public restrooms must be free, common and accessible.

The pigeons are not enemies. The pigeons are freinds.

[tsubaki94]

Hello! First time writing. I have a question about your comic about Danny. I was wondering why his parents can't come up with something technical to make it easier for him to move around?The same SmartDrive for better mobility of the stroller, or maybe technical brackets so that you can walk somehow.I know that their technology is not very developed now and they mostly hunt ghosts, but I was interested. Forgive me if it sounded like a complaint.

Don't worry I love talking about my comic ^^

So in the comic it's only been a little over 2 months since the accident, Maddie is still trying to find a medical reason for why Danny can't move his legs and aren't thinking along the track of inventing mobility aids or doing changes to their home to make it easier for Danny to get around apart from adding the ramp in the garage, moving Danny's room to down there and making sure the downstairs bathroom is accesable.

Jack on the other hand is thinking of all cool sorts of things he can invent for Danny. He made Danny a second motorized wheelchair with all sort of ghost hunting equipment (cus he is still a ghost hunting nerd) but Danny rejected it. Seeing that Danny made his own chair with his own preferences, Jack has moved on from making a wheelchair and is now drafting the Fenton-Ecto-Exoskeleton.

And Jazz got sidetracked from encuraging Danny to learn new skills related to his disability and is currently hooking up with her BF.

I am also considering giving Danny a way to motorize his Wheelchair either with something attachable making it more like a scooter or using the same technology as a electric bike where the engine gives you an extra push when you are pedaling. There will also be upgrades to the house so Danny can access every floor (For better or worse).

Thanks for asking I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the comic. <3

[aspartameabuser69]

Hi. I feel like as a colour blind person with poor eyesight I should talk about how inaccessible Hazbin Hotel and Helluva boss are.

THIS is how Hazbin Hotel looks to me (give or take, once again COLOUR BLIND). This is bad. This is REALLY bad. When your series is really hard to watch for people with VERY COMMON DISORDERS, you need to work on designing characters. Please. Really, this is horrible! It’s not even that hard, just change the colours up a bit.

[only-knives]

i love you disposable and reusable straws. i love you sippy cups. i love you cups and containers with handles. i love you tiny utensils and toothbrushes. i love you ergonomic art supplies. i love you lap desks. i love you wireless electronics. i love you cushioned surfaces. i love you automatic and press to open doors. i love you wide seats and high weight limits. i love you adjustable clothes, furniture, mobility aids, etc etc. i love you accessibility and comfort.

[maive-the-sheep]

I find it so interesting that accessibility features for games are assumed to just make them easier.

Is toggle to walk instead of hold...easier?

Is toggle to sprint instead of hold easier?

Is autoswing easier for you?

Is colorblind modes easier to see for you?

Is hold to press 4 times a second easier for you?

Is visual indicators of sound easier?

...if you say yes to questions like these. You probably aren't playing the difficulty that others are playing, they have it easier, you are just putting it to their level when you apply them.

You suffering more then the average player doesn't make you a better gamer at that game...it means you are suffering more.

Like if you still don't want to turn on those features, go ahead. But also feel free to try them out. See if it helps with your enjoyment of the game or fulfillment or whatever you get out of the game.

Cause that is what games truly are. What you get out of them.

[stabbysorrows]

I am begging you, if you are a blog that posts a lot of photos/screenshots (even more if it's most or all you post: LEARN TO DO IMAGE DESCRIPTION

Either within the post (ie. [ID: .... End ID]) or as the alt text.

Which brings me to my next point: DON'T ACTIVATE THE ALT TEXT IF YOU DON'T PUT ANYTHING IN IT.

Alt text is not automated, you have to input the description. If you're not gonna do it, don't use it.

This is specially important if you are posting information for example about the genocide in gaza or the luigi mangioni case. Disabled people still need to access that information, still NEED that information.

Image descriptions and alt texts are so important for a lot of people with visual disabilities. But if making this site more accesible for blind folks is not enough to convince you... let me remind you that accesibility helps everyone. Bad internet and the image won't load... image description. Images get removed for "violating policy"... IMAGE DESCRIPTION.

People with sensory disabilities have the right to access information, even if that information is just a somewhat funny meme.

[nr1-logo-design-inspiration]

Design meme - UI & UX problems 😅

[a-little-revolution]

Hiya! I'm writing a character with dwarfism (achondroplasia specifically) and I had a quick question. She's a minor background character but I wanted her to still be represented properly and accurately. I'd like for her to be a baker and this is in a medieval fantasy setting.

What are things I should keep in mind as she works in a kitchen? My main concern is the best way for her to get around the kitchen, like going from one counter to the next.

I also want to make sure I don't have her doing any tasks that would hurt her, or show her doing things that would be impossible to do (like bending a certain way).

Would things like kneading dough, mixing ingredients, etc. cause any issues with pain? Obviously it depends on the person but I just wanted to check since most things I see online mention pain in the spine and legs, and reduced joint mobility.

I imagine it would be hard for her to stand for long periods, would a specific type of chair or back brace help? Are there any specific models of chairs you know/like that I can use as a reference for drawing her chair?

Hello!! I'm very passionate about this question as I myself am a baker with dwarfism!! I went to college for it and worked for a while, but most bakeries don't want disabled folks in the kitchen - so my career has changed to customer service while I sort out what I want to do (likely tattooing or something artsy).

Here's some things that would make the kitchen more accessible to your character with dwarfism:

Lower counters, or platforms/stools throughout so she can access her work space

Sinks with long handles (possibly an attachment) for easy reaching. Keep in mind that most LP have a shorter reach as well as height, so long counters and deep sinks can pose an obstacle.

Smaller tools to account for her hand size - stainless steel bowls that are lightweight and easy to carry

Yes, kneading and mixing could cause pain if she has arthritis, which many little people do - she may choose to wear a wrist brace, use a stand mixer, or take frequent brakes

Her apron will be long on her, so she'll likely hike it up at the waist when she ties it

Seating areas, such as near the stove when brakes are available, is something I find I need, but she may or may not depending on her capabilities and leg pain. Her chair would have short legs and a shallow seat with good back support.

She may choose to have other people carry hot pots of water or spill able things to the sink, as getting off and on a stool/platform with such things are a safety risk. She'll likely carry thing like that on her hip.

When I was in baking school I bought a lot of my own tools - smaller and lighter rolling pins, grips for lids, wooden tongs to reach things and turn on elements, etc.

I hope this helps! - E

[playgroundeyes]

TAG AND WARN AND USE THE FUCKING "READ MORE" FEATURE BEFORE POSTING A VIDEO WITH FLASHING / STROBE LIGHTING!!!!!!!!!! DO IT THE FUCK NOW!!!

[cryptcatz]

shoutout to that time i was at a concert, in my wheelchair in the handicapped section and the person in front of me stood up and danced….blocking my view

[lolathelooptyloop]

being neurodivergent and having neurodivergent friends is so fun because wdym i can come over to your house, yap about our shared special interest for 2 hours and then lapse into silence and just enjoy each other's company for another 3 hours until we both telepathically agree we're done and i say i wanna go and you let me out and wish me a good night without doing the whole "oh, no, stay" thing. i could never do this shit with a neurotypical person

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and Themes of Disability, Mental Illness, and Criminality.

Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.

Verisimilitude, What Would a Person Do?

To understand Eureka’s themes regarding disability, mental illness, and criminality, you first have to understand its verisimilitude.

“Verisimilitude” is defined as “the appearance of being true or real,” and it is a big part of the core design ethos behind Eureka. It is a very realistic game.

We aren’t necessarily of the opinion that “realism” is a better design choice than stylization overall for RPGs, but it is a better design choice for Eureka, because we want the PCs to be very normal, believable people who make believable, organic decisions in extraordinary situations. No matter what anyone says, the mechanics of a TTRPG strongly influence what kind of stories are told with it, and what characters do in those stories. So if we want characters to make realistic decisions, the world they inhabit and interact with must be constructed of realistic rules.

Even though there is a small chance that they may be a supernatural creature, PCs in Eureka are still not fearless action heroes, chosen ones, or anything of the sort. They’re normal people with jobs, friends, and families who get mixed up in mysterious and/or dangerous situations, often against their will. They are fragile, vulnerable, imperfect, and they, largely, know it.

“Composure” is a mechanic that helps you know it too. I’ve given a deeper explanation of the Composure mechanic in the post linked here, but I’ll give a very very very condensed version in this post. Composure can sort of be thought of as “emotional/fatigue HP,” (and no, it is NOT “sanity”) it acts as a guideline for how well your character is handling the situation, and when it gets low enough, it starts to have serious mechanical effects as well, because a character’s stat modifier can never be higher than their current Composure level. Fear, hunger, and fatigue all lower Composure, and eating, sleeping, and bonding with one’s fellow investigators can all restore it, at least for normal people. More on that further down. All you really need to know for now is that when Composure gets below zero it starts eating into HP, so characters can even pass out or die from loss of Composure, and also one single bullet is enough to permanently cripple a character, and the rate of Composure loss during combat reflects how serious that is for the characters.

Grievous Wounds

It isn’t too uncommon for RPGs to have some sort of “flaw” system, whereby in character creation you can give your PC “flaws” or some kind of penalty, and usually get that balanced out by being able to add extra bonuses elsewhere, and these “flaws” may take the form of disabilities.

Critical Role’s Candela Obscura, the whole document of which is one of the most egregious examples of liberalism and toxic positivity I’ve ever seen in the TTRPG space, takes this beyond just character creation, and makes it so that if a PC receives a “scar” in combat that reduces their physical stats, their mental stats automatically go up by an equivalent amount, and proudly asserts that to make any mechanic which functions otherwise is ableist. I think you can probably tell what I think of that from this sentence alone and I don’t need to elaborate. Getting bogged down in all the failures, mechanical and moral, of Candela Obscura would make this post three times as long.

I actually do think that as long as you aren’t moralizing and patting yourself on the back this hard about it, “flaw” systems in character creation are a pretty good idea in most cases, it allows for more varied options during character creation, while preserving game balance between the PCs.

But in real life, people aren’t balanced. The events that left me injured and disabled didn’t make me smarter or better at anything—if anything, they probably made me stupider, considering the severity of the concussion! Some things happened to me, and now I’m worse. There’s no upside, I just have to keep going by trying harder with a less efficient body, and rely more on others in situations where I am no longer capable of perfect self-sufficiency.

Denying that a disabled person is, by definition, less capable of doing important tasks than the average person is to deny that they need help, and to deny that they need help is to enable a refusal to help.

This is the perspective from which Eureka’s Grievous Wounds mechanic was written.

When a character is reduced to 1 HP, which by design can result from a single hit from most weapons, they may become incapacitated, or they may take a Grievous Wound, which is a permanent injury with no stat benefits. Think twice before getting into a shootout.

Grievous Wounds don’t have to result from combat, they can also be given to a character during character creation, but not as a trade-off for an extra bonus.

“But then doesn’t my character just have worse stats than the rest of the party?” Yes, didn’t you read the above section? There is no benefit, except for the opportunity to play a disabled character in an TTRPG, and this character will probably have to be more reliant on the rest of the party to get by in various situations. Is that a bad thing?

Monsters

Just like mundane people in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, monsters are playable, because they are regular people. I’ve gone over this in other posts and also you can just read about it in Chapter 8 of the Eureka rulebook, but the setting of Eureka doesn’t have a conspiracy or “masquerade” hiding or separating supernatural people from normal society. They exist within normal society, and a lot of them eat people.

Most RPGs consider monsters to just be evil, they do evil for evil’s sake. RPGs that seek to subvert this expectation often instead make monsters misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted, but harmless. Eureka takes a wholly different approach.

There are five playable types of monsters in the rulebook right now, and it’ll be seven if we hit all the stretch goals, but for simplicity’s sake this post will just focus on the vampire. Despite them applying in different ways, the same overall themes apply to nearly every monster, so if you get the themes for the vampire, you’ll get the gist of what Eureka is doing with monsters in general.

I mentioned Composure above, and how it can normally be restored by eating food and sleeping. Well, vampires can not restore their Composure this way. They don’t sleep, and normal people food might be tasty as long as it isn’t too heavily seasoned for them, but it doesn’t do anything for them nutritionally. Their main way to restore Composure is fresh living human blood, straight from the source. To do what mundane PCs do normally by just eating and sleeping, vampires have to take from another, whether they’re happy with this arrangement or not. They do not, of course, literally have to, and a player is not forced to make their vampire PC drink blood, just like you don’t literally have to eat food, but they do and you do if you want to live in any degree of comfort or happiness, or else they’d eventually just sit at 0 Composure and not be able to effectively do anything.

There’s a reason that this is a numerical mechanic and not simply a rule that says something like “this character is a vampire and therefore they must drink blood once every session,” and that is to emphasize and demonstrate that the circumstances a person faces drive their behavior. In America, there is a tendency to think of criminality and harmfulness as resulting from something of an intrinsic evil, but in my experience and observation, people do not just wake up at like age 16 and decide “I think I’ll go down the criminal life path.” Through their life circumstances they have been barred from the opportunities that would have given them other options. People need food, food costs money, money requires work, work requires getting hired, but getting hired requires a nearby job opening, an education, an impressive resume, nice clean clothes, a charismatic attitude, consistent transportation, and so on. For people without, criminality is something they are funneled into, which becomes harder to avoid the longer they go without consistent access to their basic needs. The choice will be between taking money from others by force or trickery, or running completely out of money.

As the Composure counter ticks down, a vampire, or other playable monster, is going to encounter much the same dilemma. There is little to no “legal” or “harmless” way for them to get their needs met, even if they do have some money. Society just isn’t set up for that. And no your kink is not the solution to this, trying to suggest every vampire get into sex work is like one step removed from telling every girl she should just get an OnlyFans the minute she turns 18, or that women should just marry a man and be a housewife that gets taken care of if they want their needs met.

Playable monsters in Eureka are dangerous, harmful people. They were set up to be.

“Oh well then the vampire should just eat bad people!” You mean those same bad people i just described above? See this post for answers to all the other arguments people are going to make to try and absolve vampires of causing harm.

Society not being set up for that brings me to next reading/theme: Monstrousness as disability, and monsters as takers.

Mundane human characters restore 2 points of Composure per day just by eating food and sleeping, but vampires do not, they can’t. To restore their Composure they have to take from others a valuable resource that everyone needs to live and the extraction of which is excruciatingly painful and debilitating (blood). No one knows what happens to blood after a vampire drinks it, it’s just gone. Vampires are open wounds through which blood pours out of the universe.

This is a special need, something they have to take but cannot give back. Their special needs make them literally a drain on society and the world.

Even in so-called “progressive” spaces, there is a tendency to consider takers, people who take much more than they give back, such as disabled people, as something that needs to be pruned, with the mask over this being the aforementioned total denial of the fact that disabled people take more than they can give.

In this way, vampires and other playable monsters are, inarguably, “takers,” but in positioning them as protagonists right beside mundane protagonists, Eureka puts you in their shoes, and forces you to at least reckon with the circumstances that make them this way, as well as acknowledge their inner lives. You have to acknowledge two things: That they are dangerous, harmful people who take more than they can give, and that they are people. Because they are people, Eureka asserts that they have inherent value, a right to exist, and a right to do what they need to do to exist.

One final point is that of monstrousness as mental illness. Mental illness is a disability, one pretty comparable to physical disability in a lot of ways, so all of the above about disability can apply to this metaphor as well, but there are a few unique comparisons to make here.

It’s not the most efficient, but there are a couple of loopholes deliberately left in the rules that allow vampires to restore Composure without drinking blood. Eureka! moments can restore Composure, and Comfort checks from fellow investigators can restore Composure.

When I was writing the rules for how monsters regain Composure in accordance to these themes, I came to a dilemma where I wasn’t sure if it was thematically appropriate for them to be able to regain Composure in these ways, but ultimately I decided that yes, they can. It works with themes of mental illness, which is mental disability.

People with mental illnesses may have the potential to be harmful and dangerous, but study after study, including my own observation, has shown that mentally ill people with robust support structures and agency allowed to them to handle tasks are much less likely to enact harm, be that physical violence, relational violence, or violence against the self. So that’s why I kept that rule in for playable monsters. Being able to accomplish goals, and having friends who are there for them, makes the harmful person less likely to cause unnecessary harm.

I couldn’t really figure out where to fit this paragraph in so I’m sticking it here right before the conclusion: Vampires are especially great for this because they’re immortal, and because they always come back when “killed.” They can’t be exterminated, they aren’t going away, there will always be problem people in society, no matter how utopian or “progressive.” They’re a never-ending curse, who will always be a problem. The question is how you will handle them, not how you will get rid of them.

In conclusion,

Eureka is as much a study of the characters themselves as it is the mystery being solved by the characters. It is a harsh, but compassionate game, that argues through its own gameplay that yes, people do have needs which drive their behavior, many people do have special needs that are beyond their ability to reciprocate, and failure to meet the needs of even a small number of people in a society has high potential to harm the entire society, not just those individuals whose needs are unmet.

And Candela Obscura sucks.

Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[fouldevil]

i am so tired of inaccessible accessibility. when i went to the hospital last week, i couldn’t fit my average sized wheelchair into the stall of two bathroom handicap stalls, and worse couldn’t turn around in two other handicap specific restrooms! in a literal HOSPTIAL. i’d make a joke but honestly i’m too tired of feeling like i don’t belong.