#general accommodations

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Guide to Accessibility, Adiustments & Accommodations

General:

Reduce sensory overwhelm in spaces/provide safe and quiet space

Providing clear communication / no ambiguity or vagueness

More time to process questions or information

Choice to:

wear noise-cancelling headphones or earbuds

communicate via other methods (AAC: picture/word cards, sign language) . to use stim objects whenever necessary

to be excused /take a break if needed

Social:

Meeting in safe/comfortable settings

Advanced warnings of cancellations

Understanding if needing to cancel or leave early

No pressure to talk/make eye contact/make physical contact

Clear information on what is going to happen/when/with whom

School:

Private room for exams

Extended deadlines

Extra time in exams

Note-taking assistance

I-2-I Support/private tutoring

Nominated safe person/space

Support with technology/AAC

Breaks when needed

Support moving around school

Not to be picked on in class/signalling system to talk

Accompaniment on trips

Accessible fonts and backgrounds for worksheets/presentations

Exemption from assemblies

Safe space to eat with more time

Work:

Quiet(er)/less overwhelming workspace

Extra breaks

Time to think in interviews

Interview questions ahead of time

Bringing in notes for an interview

Clear schedule/routine, with advanced warning of changes

Mentorship/support

Flexible work times

Ability to work from home if able

Exemptions from group activities or meetings

Comfortable work equipment e.g. chairs/keyboards

Autisticality

Slightly edited the picture to make it easier to see

[prolibytherium]

Would kill to read animal POV fiction that has the animal POV’s interaction with humans be like, semi realistic to the level of caution most predators take with large prey and/or competitors (including humans).

Like instead of the usual - “the human is such a weak, pathetic creature... so slow, no claws, blunt teeth… completely helpless without its 'Fire Sticks'. how is it the master of the earth?” type crap it’s like, the bear protagonist or whatever approaches some dude who spreads their arms and yells and the bear is like “FUUUUUUUUCK THAT THING JUST GOT HUGE. IT'S LARGE AND MAKING NOISES. HOLY FUCK.”

[coochiequeens]

Doctors and nurses who are not willing to listen to their patients should be replaced

BY VICTORIA SMITH

The third time I went into labour, I was determined to avoid getting told off. With both of my previous births, I had somehow managed to get things wrong. My errors the first time: going to hospital too early, then, when I returned three hours later, “leaving it so late”. The second time: ignoring assurances that I didn’t need to come in yet, then giving birth in the car park — an event I later discovered was being used in antenatal classes as an example of women “not planning ahead”.

“My previous births have been fast,” I said, when I went into labour with my third, “so I’d like to come in now.” I was speaking to the woman at the midwife-led unit that is the only option where I live. (If you need a caesarean section, you have to be transferred to next town.) “Third babies are notoriously difficult,” was her response.

What an odd thing to say to a woman already in labour. The “notoriously” suggested it wasn’t based on any actual evidence, but rather a kind of folk wisdom. It felt as though I was being warned not to tempt fate, not to assume that this baby would just pop out. I saw myself being categorised as one of those arrogant women who presumes to know her own body, only to be taught a harsh yet much-deserved lesson. “Third babies are notoriously difficult” sounded not unlike “third-time mothers shouldn’t get above themselves”.

In fact, I have never been particularly cocky about childbirth. When I was pregnant with my first child, back in the days when the Right-wing press were still obsessed with famous women being “too posh to push”, I wondered if I might be able to get an elective caesarean myself. I did not particularly care about childbirth being a wonderful experience, or about “doing it well”. I didn’t care if the Daily Mail thought I was a joke.

What I cared about was not having a child who would face the same difficulties as my brother, who was starved of oxygen at birth. This has had serious consequences for him, and for the rest of my family. Just how serious is hard to gauge. He was born traumatised; there has never been a before to compare the after with. What there has been instead is the hazy outline of an alternative life, one that runs parallel to the one he has now. It’s a life that began with the problem being identified sooner, with him being delivered quickly, perhaps by emergency caesarean. The difference between this and his actual life comes down to something small: mere moments, mere breaths.

I was born three years after my brother, in a larger hospital, where my mother was induced and monitored carefully. There is something very strange about being the sibling who had the safe birth. It feels as though I stole it. There is a constant sense of guilt, as if my life — my independence, my choices — constitutes a form of gloating. “This is what you could have had.” Everything I do feels like something owed to my brother (do it, because he can’t) but also something taken from him (you shouldn’t have done that, because he should have done it first).

Still, my family were fortunate, insofar as my brother didn’t die. Current reports on the Nottingham maternity scandal reference 1,700 cases, with an estimated 201 mothers and babies who might have survived had they received better care. What strikes me, reading them, is the enormous gulf between the cost of a disastrous birth and the trivial, opportunistic way in which childbirth is so often politicised — with mothers themselves viewed as morally, if not practically, to blame if anything goes wrong.

As a feminist who concerns herself with how the female body is demonised, my interest in debates about birthing choices is more than personal. I have read books railing against the over-medicalisation of childbirth, aligning it with a patriarchal need to appropriate female reproductive power. I have also read books protesting the fetishisation of “natural” birth, suggesting that it infantilises women, that it implies women deserve pain. To be honest, I find both arguments persuasive and dismaying. Both are right about the way in which misogyny and professional arrogance can shift the focus away from meeting the needs of women and babies. I feel a kind of rage that we are told to pick a side.

Representations of the labouring woman are so often negative: the naïve idealist, the “birthzilla“, the birth-plan obsessive, the woman who is “too posh to push”. This latter stereotype has gone hand-in-hand with a veneration of vaginal births, and stigmatisation of caesareans, that has had sometimes disastrous consequences. Midwives at the centre of the Furness General Hospital scandal were reported to have “pursued natural birth ‘at any cost’”, referring to one another as “the musketeers”; at least 11 babies and one mother died. But their approach was sanctioned by their employer: the 2006 NHS document “Pathways to Success: a self-improvement toolkit” explicitly suggested that “maternity units applying best practice to the management of pregnancy, labour and birth will achieve a [caesarean section] rate consistently below 20% and will have aspirations to reduce that rate to 15%”. Proposed benefits to this included “a sense of pride in units”.

Responses to maternity scandals now express horror that such an anti-intervention culture ever arose — responses in the same press that denigrated women such as Victoria Beckham and Kate Winslet for not giving birth vaginally. Instead, newspapers now stoke outrage over “natural” treatments during NHS births, such as burning herbs. Women have been shamed for having caesareans, but they have also been shamed for wanting births with minimum intervention — as though they are selfish and spoilt for seeking control over such an extreme situation.

In his memoir This Is Going To Hurt, former doctor Adam Kay writes disparagingly of women who arrive at the delivery suite with birth plans:

“‘Having a birth plan’ always strikes me as akin to having a ‘what I want the weather to be’ plan or a ‘winning the lottery’ plan. Two centuries of obstetricians have found no way of predicting the course of a labour, but a certain denomination of floaty-dressed mother seems to think she can manage it easily.”

Wanting to have some control over your experience of labour — which will hurt you and could kill you or your baby — is not akin to some messianic aspiration to control the weather. And in his mockery of the woman who wants whale song and aromatherapy oils, ironically, Kay deploys the same silencing techniques that might intimidate a woman out of seeking the very interventions he so prizes. What he and others do not seem to grasp is that their arrogance is a problem, regardless of which course of action they champion. It makes women feel they can’t speak, for fear of inviting hostility at their most vulnerable moments. It’s true that none of us knows our body well enough to know how we will give birth. But, looking back, I find it utterly insane, not least given my own family history, that one of my biggest worries during labour was “please don’t let anyone get cross with me”. Then again, I don’t think that fear is unrelated to the desire to remain safe.

Birth is not a joke. It is not a place for professional dick-swinging or political one-upmanship. I cannot describe — and, as I am not my mother, cannot fully understand — the shame of feeling that you “let down” your child before they drew their first breath, that they will forever suffer because of it. You watch an entire life unfolding and that feeling is there, every single day. This is the fear of the women in labour who are characterised as either idiots mesmerised by fantasy homebirths or cold-hearted posh ladies who can’t take the pain. If things go wrong, they are the ones who will bear the consequences, reflecting every day on what might have been, if they’d only done more.

When people discuss their siblings, my mind does wander to the one I don’t have, the one who was born safely. Perhaps he would have a job he loved, or one he hated, but in any case a job. Perhaps he would have a partner. Perhaps he would have children, and I would be their aunt. Perhaps we wouldn’t get on, wouldn’t even speak, but he’d have a life of his own. I know he thinks about this too. I wonder if the professionals who presided over his birth have thought about him since.

My third labour was not, by the way, “notoriously difficult”. My third son arrived into the world safe and well. No one can say why him or me, and not my brother. Mothers may long for control over birth, for which we are mocked; but we do not have it, for which we are blamed. Politics still takes precedence over our needs, and the needs of our babies.

[tangledinink]

new gemini update was so good as always but I can't stop thinking:

big mama: there's nothing wrong with my sons

splinter: you fucked up two perfectly good kids is what you did. look at blue. he's got an eating disorder

wwhhhattttt? nooo, don't be silly. leo doesn't have an eating disorder.

leo and donnie have eating disorders--

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

Hiii everyone, say, how do your Hawkes go go about sharing their estate? If they do it at all? Is everyone free to come and go or are they more private? Or do they only invite their LI to stay? I'm curious!! :)

[harteofthehart-ayyy]

How big were the land bridges your Magma created?

Uhhh. Pretty significantly big. I tried scribbling them in on a map of Hoenn. There was the big one, and then an island that had non-land bridges (so normal bridges) that connected Sootopolis to the mainland.

[power-chords]

I mean yeah I agree for the most part but I guess I just can’t sequester my definition of “love” in the exclusive territory of emotion. That’s a big word, love. And it includes, for some of us who are awed and humbled by its bigness, love as law, as obligation…

[spacedocmom]

Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom When your society learns that maximizing disabled accommodations for everyone who needs them without means-testing everybody for everything actually results in everyone having an easier life, you'll all be better for it. emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked 3:59 PM · Mar 31, 2024

[adhbabey]

i think like. so much would be solved if we normalized the fact that some people do experience delusions and hallucinations. like yes, its something that those people need help with/need more accommodations for, but we could use being more understanding of people with psychotic symptoms in general.

like, i can tell you that at least one person raving about conspiracy theories is someone who experiences delusions, and if we understood that, we wouldn't have such a hard time getting them back to a more grounded perspective.

i am someone who experiences delusions and I do get incredibly triggered by all the unreality bullshit, the simulation theories, all that unreal bullshit, and it is actively negatively impacting people like me.

we could really use a better understanding of those with these symptoms, because acting like having hallucinations/delusions makes you a killer is a take that makes zero sense. Like, genuinely, you have no idea what you're talking about if that's where you immediately go. I can point out a bunch of shit discussing the darkness of humanity and that logic applies to anyone, regardless of mental illness. Delusions and hallucinations don't mean you'll act on anything, it just means that your brain is creating false images or thoughts, and that can get really fucking confusing.

We could use a little more empathy or compassion towards those with these symptoms, because obviously this shit isn't going away for us, just like other disabled people dealing with their disabilities. We are not idiots or monsters, our brain just gives us random false shit sometimes and it really fucking sucks. Be more understanding or I'll telepathically insert false shit into your brain one day, y'all should see the nightmare that some of us have to deal with.

[sprinkleofquirk]

Moooooooore bracelets

They will make a fine addition to my collection

[thethingything]

the thing about people setting boundaries with us is that it means I don't have to worry as much about whether they secretly think I'm really annoying or whatever, because if they've set boundaries and told me when stuff I do bothers them in the past, then I know they're willing to tell me if I'm doing something they don't like, and can assume that if they haven't said anything, I'm probably fine

[a-sketchy]

a persona inspired ttrpg would fuck so hard

[dreamieparadise]

I finished my Dr appointment and am planning on not going back to class lmaoooo

Submitted my group assignment too, so I'm soooo over that headache and heartache!!

[identityquest]

lizzie get two wolves 👍

[themarsbar]

.

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

I just came across this post which explains that disabled people are welcome in the community regardless of the source of their disability. Specifically, people who “did it to themselves” via complications from addiciton, injuries from high-risk behavior, or any number of other reasons (although someone in the notes correctly points out that addiction is already a disability on its own.) Its not currently reblogable but I really wanted the sentiment to reach as many people as possible

So just to be clear, people who “did it to themselves” still deserve accommodation and acceptance and community. In fact I would even go so far as to say nobody ever really “did it to themselves” because no healthy person with options would ever willingly or knowingly disable themselves, and also because factors leading up to pretty much any disability can actually be traced back for generations.