carnistprivilege:

actuallyblind:

let-the-spectrum-in:

actuallyblind:

drackir:

candidlyautistic:

carnistprivilege:

actuallyblind:

Small tip to help some of your blind friends: do not put 10,000 emojis in the middle of a text or a post if you continue to put text after the emojis because I will tell you that I will Straight give up if I have to listen to “face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy,” 23 times just to hear the rest of your text or post.

Oh my god, that’s what screen readers say when they read out emojis?? I didn’t realize.. I will change how I write my posts now… My bad…

This is good to know. Pretend there are twenty three light bulb emojis indicating sudden understanding following this text.

So the clap hands emoji post would be extra annoying since you can’t just speed read it, damn!

YES. That is one of my least favorite emojis because it’s LONG. It also says skin tone on some, and while that’s AWESOME, if you put 30 prayer hands, I have to hear “hands clasped in celebration with medium dark skin tone” 30 times in full. And even if I use a braille display, it still writes it out in full because there’s no real way to represent them any other way yet, so until someone invents a Braille display with like 10 lines that isn’t astronomically expensive, there’s no easy way to skip over them.

Now, at least with some screen readers, punctuation is a little different and if there are multiple of the same thing it’ll say like “17 exclamation points” instead of saying them all individually, and I wish that update would be made to screen readers to speak emojis in multiples that way… That would be a good solution.

Is it okay to use emojis sparingly? I don’t ever use a million like that, the most I’d put in a row is probably two different emojis, lol. But I do feel the need to use either emojis or ASCII faces in order to get emotion across in my writing. Which is better for you, a traditional ASCII face like 🙂 or a newfangled emoji like ☺️? Can your screen reader “translate” things like 🙂 into “smiling face” or do you just hear “colon dash right parentheses”?

Oh yeah, of course! If you only use one or two in a row that’s totally fine! Don’t feel like you have to just stop using them. They are fun and lots of people like them.

As for emoji versus traditional typed out faces, it doesn’t really matter. It can’t translate most of those faces except for a general smiley face, but I know what the symbols put together mean, though this may be difficult for somebody who is not very well versed in print reading. Most blind kids get taught to recognize both though.

There’s so much good info on this post! I didn’t know any of this. Thanks for making it!!

In fact, one reason society makes such stark value judgments about disabled lives is that disabled people are isolated from these kinds of conversations and cut out of the medical establishment. Ironically, the Times ran an article about the need to hire more disabled physicians a day before it was pushing for infanticide on the opinion pages. “Often the barrier to medical care isn’t the disability but a health system poorly equipped to handle it,” Dhruv Khullar wrote in the piece. The architects of that health-care system are indifferent to disability because they are acculturated to thinking of disabled lives as less-than.

micdotcom:

Democratic senator calls for removal of Education Dept. civil rights head for sexual assault comment

  • The leading Democrat on the Senate’s education committee is urging U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to fire the head of the department’s civil rights office, due to her controversial comments regarding sexual assault.
  • In a press release issued on Monday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Candice Jackson, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, “crossed a serious line” when she told the New York Times on Wednesday that 90% of college sexual assault claims “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”
  • Murray dismissed Jackson’s comments as “callous, insensitive and egregious” and said they should bar her from serving in a role where she has clout over “students’ right to be safe at school.” Read more. (7/17/2017 5:25 PM)

gladyslafontant:

People could just ask me about things instead of assuming my brain runs on UTTER CHAOS AND CONFUSION.  It doesn’t.  I think about a lot of stuff and react …  unpredictably?  I guess?

I’m not unpredictable to myself.

I have a friend with schizophrenia who says stuff that makes no sense until she’s healthier and can explain what she met.  “My medicine is a she and her name is Lily” = the medicine’s abbreviation is lily.  I’m the only friend who wasn’t scared away from her.  She never scared me.

You can just ask people about what they think and say, and why.  There are answers.