definatalie:Image - a pale pink belt wrapped around a dressmaker’s mannequin. The belt has a double bow at the front.
this whole image description thing that is going around tumblr is ridic. honestly how many blind people do you think are reading your blog? none. they are all out walking with their free rad dogs or those stick things.
just. fucking. stop. it.
it just seems like some quasi whimsical bullshit to everyone except you and like 4 other people who are all “HALP THE VISION IMPAIRED ON THE INTARNUTS”
Hey you’re a jerk and no one reads your tumblr and you have a doo doo head.
Dear abowlfullofblood,
How does it feel to be that wilfully terrible a person? Let’s break this down.
honestly how many blind people do you think are reading your blog?
Well I know for a fact at least one had in the past. And one is enough, because I actually want everyone reading my blog to get the full experience out of my blog! Besides, they don’t only benefit blind people—people with shitty internet, who can’t watch videos at work, who have audio processing difficulties—even just people who read faster than they parse visual input, which is true of me. We all benefit from image and video descriptions/transcriptions.
they are all out walking with their free rad dogs or those stick things.
Okay, it’s not as easy to get a service dog as you seem to think. Nor are all blind people able to obtain a cane. But beyond that, why are you assuming that walking is all they do? Blind people are—shockingly—people! They have the same interests as other people! Sometimes that includes reading books or hanging out online! It may be harder for them sometimes, not in small part because of assholes like you who are dedicating to maintaining inaccessibility, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still do it.
just. fucking. stop. it.
how. about. fucking. no.
Here’s where we get to the crux of the issue—why do you care? What about the presence of image descriptions is so abhorrent to you? They’re typically pretty clearly demarcated—it takes around half a second to register the presence of one and just not read it. Are you really so threatened by the idea of people with screenreaders being able to use the internet? What is SO GODDAMNED AWFUL about accessibility?
it just seems like some quasi whimsical bullshit to everyone except you and like 4 other people who are all “HALP THE VISION IMPAIRED ON THE INTARNUTS”
Tell that to the people who benefit from it, myself included. Tell that to everyone who is actually able to fucking get something out of a post that is built around an image or a video because someone has taken into account that not everyone has access to those forms of media. Seriously.
And do you know what whimsical means? Like, what the fuck is ‘whimsical’ about writing out what shows in an image? Is it capricious? No, we have well-thought-out reasons for it. Fanciful? It’s pretty down-to-earth, maybe. Odd? Only because of how hostile our culture is to people with disabilities. Seriously, that is a completely fucking inappropriate word choice.
Finally, there are a lot more than four of us on Tumblr who care about disability rights. We are a pretty vibrant and diverse group of folks, actually! We’re even big enough that we have separate factions that have nothing to do with one another! And that’s not even including the organising we do in other online spaces, or in our day-to-day physical offline lives. We are working hard, all the time. Not, again, because of “whimsy”. Because we have to. Because this is our lives we are talking about, and our ability to access things other folks take for granted.
We’re getting there. We’re progressing. All assholes like you are doing is slowing us down.
This is a good answer and far more thoughtful than my facetious response.