#Accessibility Barriers

[onservantswings]

The day I realized two-factor authentication was why I suddenly stopped being able to keep up with my budget was huge. My routine and fail-safes made it possible for me to consistently know how much was in my bank at any given time. Now, with two-factor authentication it's nigh impossible to get the motivation to sign into all the apps I need to balance my stupid f"ing budget. There is no accomodations for this, as all systems I use require it. I'm only 34 and miss paper checks, offices you could visit and get things done, and a TV I knew how to operate. *Capitalism grumbles*

Its okay they could call me on a rotary faster than i could explain to them I’m old enough to know what a rotary phone is

[alwaysbewoke]

[mxystan]

taiwan travelogue by yang shuangzi tr. lin king is indeed an award-winning banger and perhaps the first time in my life i've ever felt vindicated for dual-wielding a novel with its english translation because the act of translation itself is such a big theme in the novel. big win for metafiction-obsessed himejin everywhere!!

[thursdayinspace]

I went through locking half my fics on AO3 and then couldn't continue. I HATE this. I believe in fandom being free of barriers and easily accessible to everyone. I don't WANT people to have to make accounts to read fic. I want people to be able to comment and kudos anonymously if they don't want to sign their username to it for *whatever reason they may have*. But I spend weeks, sometimes months on my fics. I don't want AI to have them. I hate this. I'll keep thinking about this. But seriously fuck AI. I hate having to make fandom a members-only club to protect our work.

[ivygorgon]

An open letter to the U.S. House of Representatives

Vote NO on the SAVE Act!

8,228 so far! Help us get to 10,000 signers!

I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 22, the so-called “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” (SAVE) Act. While this bill is framed as a measure to combat voter fraud, it is, in reality, a voter suppression effort that creates unnecessary barriers to voting and disenfranchises millions of Americans.

The SAVE Act would require voters to present narrow forms of “documentary proof of citizenship,” such as a passport or birth certificate, to participate in federal elections. This would disproportionately harm:

- Up to 150 million Americans who do not have a passport.

- Approximately 69 million women citizens who do not have a birth certificate with their current legal name on it.

- Elderly Americans, who are the least likely to hold passports.

Additionally, in 7 states, less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport – Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

The SAVE Act is a solution in search of a problem. Worse, it would erode the fundamental right to vote, silencing the voices of vulnerable communities under the guise of election security. Rather than advancing harmful legislation like the SAVE Act, Congress should focus on protecting and expanding voting rights by supporting measures such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

One of the foundational values of our democracy is the idea that every person is entitled to a vote – a say in the direction of our nation. I urge you and your colleagues to work towards that founding ideal. Thanks.

▶ Created on February 6 by Jess Craven · 8,228 signers in the past 7 days

📱 Text SIGN PKFOYU to 50409 to sign!

🤯 Text FOLLOW JESSCRAVEN101 to 50409

[otterandterrier]

going insane looking at the replies and tags in the post about skincare. what the fuck do you mean you don't wash your fucking face every day????

[liones-s]

a word on academic accommodations: these are not just for illness. Things like testing anxiety or stress that prevents you from sleeping are actual problems that impact your academic performance, and that makes them grounds for accommodations. Talk to your accessibility services department, see what documentation is required, and if you’re able to, speak to your doctor (most campuses have a school clinic even though booking is a nightmare) and ask your doctor about documentation.

Different schools may have different levels of accessibility and accommodations offices (and some don’t have one at all, but that’s for a separate post). But if your school has one, and you’re dealing with something that impacts your ability to work in a healthy and manageable way, you have grounds to talk to them. This post is for anyone who feels afraid of ‘faking’ disability in order to access something - trust me, you’re not. Go get the accommodation. You’re not at uni to prove that you’re able to function under bad conditions - you’re there to learn. Let yourself have the things you need to learn.

[coulsonlives]

I think the difference confuses a lot of people, so these pictures are super helpful.

[paleode-ology]

i needddd an organ arrangement of the music from death becomes her. i just know it would sound so good on the organ but i have no idea how i would even started arranging and composing something so i need the sheet music to just magically appear so i can play it

[raviollies]

Damn I just wanted to say the tags on your post really hit me…almost word for word I relate to all of that and I’ve been struggling trying to find a job to keep myself sane. I had a lot of those same thoughts and especially over the pandemic and it was unhealthy and awful and I lost a friendship that meant a lot to me bc of the same feelings you express in your tags. I’ve gotten a lot better, or at least I like to think I have, but learning to live with the knowledge of how you used to be (or at least being more aware of how not to be like that), and knowing you can’t turn back time has been hard. Seeking validation and attention…oof that all just hits so terribly home.

I think a lot of people developed a very unhealthy relationship with the internet over the pandemic - thankfully I was an essential worker so my pause in employment was super brief.

It IS hard to reconcile that that was also you but at the end of the day the best you can do is acting different and making a difference in the positive direction. You can't UNDO those actions - so really...moving forward is the ONLY thing to do. & while it doesn't excuse your actions, I do believe some grace needs to be given when it is coming from an unstable place such as mental illness.

I will admit I still have a very unhealthy relationship with validation. Not just online but it is turned up to 11 due to the whole dopamine hit of comments and likes. It used to be BAD, it would make me cry if a post flopped because I felt like people didn't care. It's an INCREDIBLY tough cycle, especially for someone mentally ill, but even for someone neurotypical it's common to descend into unfathomable toxicity in hopes of getting love from internet strangers. I mean recently there was a pretty prominent Vtuber scandal that was the most HORRID behavior all for the sake of being a popular streamer.

The internet is both a place that can really abate loneliness while worsening it in other aspects.

[librarycards]

like, where the fuck are people going that psychiatric / mental disability, broadly construed, is remotely accommodated? nominally "accessible" spaces disregard the overwhelming majority of sensory needs (beyond, for example, the provision of stim toys for those who need them, or a mitigation of the very loudest sounds - necessary but not sufficient for anything resembling a sensory-accessible space). comportment norms within the context of public space - disdain, fear, and hatred for "erratic behavior," from talking to oneself, to not making eye-contact, to repeated checking/entering and exiting, mean that vast swaths of mentally disabled people cannot enter public spaces, and, if we are able to enter, we're soon expelled. not even to mention the overlap between architectural inaccessibility - the acoustic design of buildings, the (non)maintenance of restrooms, the ubiquity of alcohol, the lack of railings/protections in high/exposed places - and social inaccessibility.

assertions that the world is, somehow, built for the Able-Bodied Neurodivergent boogeyman disregards both the myriad intersections of systemic ableism and systemic saneism, and the ways in which social / cultural interactions are in and of themselves architectural - the social world is a built world, informed by and informing the physical structures that populate it.

[aballofbees]

Another day… another oc….the brain rot continues to fester. I’m still working out the details of my canary’s beast/chimera(?) form, but the gist is that they combined themselves with a Giant Bee queen to help with their apiary/apothecary/brewery. She got caught because she was arrested plundering a flower shop having lost control on a night out.

[an-ruraiocht]

reflections on hormones and medical misogyny and hoop-jumping

in order to start testosterone, i ended up having to pay i think £480 total for three (3) separate appointments with two (2) separate psychiatrists to admit that i'm definitely trans before i could get a referral to an endocrinologist which also cost me several hundred pounds so that they could prescribe testosterone. i was lucky that my GP did the blood tests or i would have had to pay for those too, likewise they took over the prescriptions so i only pay the £9.50ish charge for those rather than the full price, but it was still a hell of a lot of a cash to fork out. i had to pay all of this because the waiting list for a first appointment with the gender clinic is more than five years and bc they make nonbinary people jump through more hoops for referrals than they do for binary trans people following a more conventional transition path. they now test my blood every 3 months to make sure everything's at a healthy level and it's not having a knock-on impact on my organs and they check in regularly about dosage

when i was seventeen i had a single conversation with a GP after which they put me on the combined contraceptive pill, for which i never paid a penny, and which i stayed on more or less continuously (there was one break for a few months) until i was 28. for 11 years this altered my body's hormone levels to the point of suppressing my testosterone to the absolute lowest level that could be considered technically "healthy". it just about performed its required function of making my periods regular and semi-bearable, but along the way this fucked my joints, my muscle strength, my ability to grow body hair, my energy levels, and my ability to concentrate. for eleven years. on the basis of one appointment with a non-specialist as a teenager. they never tested anything except my blood pressure and even that got skipped as time went on and they could dismiss it as "nice and low" while ignoring my chronic anaemia and fatigue

why does fucking with my hormones in one direction require constant oversight and jumping through tons of hoops, and the other doesn't? why are they so alert to the side effects of gender-affirming care, and completely ignoring the side effects of other hormonal healthcare?

it's not that they shouldn't have prescribed me the pill or should have put additional barriers in place; it's that i shouldn't have had to jump through all those hoops to access testosterone. it's not that they shouldn't be monitoring the impact of the testosterone, it's that they should have monitored the impact of the pill. it's not that 17yo me shouldn't have been trusted to give informed consent, it's that 17yo me wasn't informed but was permitted to consent, while 28yo me was informed but not permitted to consent, and had to jump through dehumanising hoops instead to have strangers assess whether they deserved to make choices

they fucked me over with both sets of hormones. they whacked my body's hormone sliders firmly towards the oestrogen/progesterone ends of the spectrum without a second thought, because that was "natural", so fuck the side effects, but they made it as hard for me as possible to try to go the other way. i was anaemic and could scarcely grow body hair and had injuries that refused to heal for years and couldn't concentrate or stay awake for a DECADE but i'm supposed to be scared of the possibility of male pattern baldness? (i mean. i am. but going a bit bald feels a small price to pay for feeling awake when my eyes are open, to borrow a phrase from the raven cycle)

so much of it in both directions is medical misogyny: the idea that i have a particular body which is supposed to behave in a particular way and so the only "solutions" available are those which conform to this, and the lack of research into the actual effects of hormones like oestrogen and progesterone on other health conditions

but what really sickens me is how they say "you can't possibly make this decision, we have to keep people away from these side effects, we don't know what impact this has on bodies long-term" but they'll put a 17yo on the pill and then abandon them despite ten years of chronic illness with no further investigation into how artificial hormone levels might be affecting some of that chronic illness. you can't have it both ways, medicine. either hormones need monitoring and caring about or they don't

access to the pill is healthcare. it should be done on an informed consent model, and needs careful monitoring to make sure it's helping not harming, and adjustments if necessary.

access to gender affirming hormones is healthcare. it should be done on an informed consent model, and needs careful monitoring to make sure it's helping not harming, and adjustments if necessary.

instead you have to fight tooth-and-nail for one and pay through the nose for it, and the other distributed carelessly with little thought or follow-up. i am only now beginning to realise how profoundly i was being fucked over by the pill and just because it also helped me does not mean it was fine that that happened and that, crucially, nobody would have realised it was happening if i hadn't decided to go on T (prompting both investigations into my actual hormone levels, and then perceptible changes once they began to shift). because they did not give a fuck. because it was "natural" for a "female" body to behave like that, right?

anyway idk if i'm gonna stay on T forever but i don't think i could ever go back on the combined pill knowing what i know now about how it's possible for my body to feel when my T level isn't literally 0.5. i'm not thrilled about the idea of going for lucky dip hormone fluctuations given how well that's gone for me in the past but i guess i'll cross that bridge when i come to it. there's got to be some kind of viable option out there for me

[alexei-home-fromthewar-at-last]

For some reason, my instagram account has started showing me a ton of morally superior vegan content?

Anyways, I’m vegetarian, but I want to make it clear that I don’t support promoting vegetarianism or veganism in that way. Shaming someone is never the way to convince them of something. It is a cruel and harmful tactic.

And it completely dismisses the fact that a vegetarian or vegan diet is limited by health, resource access, and finances.

Anyone who actually cares about animal welfare or the environment or health (whatever reason they have for being vegetarian/vegan) will take any win they can. They’ll celebrate people who are vegetarian instead of shaming them for not being vegan, they’ll celebrate pescatarians instead of shaming them for still eating fish, they’ll celebrate people who eat mostly meat-free because all these people are still contributing to their goal!