I want more female characters who are just so bad at comforting others. Not for lack of trying or caring, they just get so so awkward when someone's upset, and they try to repeat things they've heard even if it doesn't necessarily apply to the situation, or they accidentally say the wrong thing and make it worse. If someone cries they panic and throw every single comfort technique down at once and it only helps because it's such bizarre behaviour

Basically I'm tired of female characters having the inherent “good helper/wise advisor” trait just bc they're women, and I'm also tired of the faux progressive 'female characters must have no emotion whatsoever'. People seem to think the opposite of being a good caretaker is just not caring, when actually the opposite of being a good caretaker is not knowing which care to take and when or how. Like throwing water onto an oil fire. Putting blankets over someone who is claustrophobic. Recommending family time to an orphan. Etc. I want a female character who will be up with you until 3am because you're struggling but she can't stop quoting Mister Rogers because she has NO idea what to say. Even if she's experienced the same things, she just has no idea how to convey any wisdom through words and gets super duper awkward if you start crying

you want her

"In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option."

--Against Access, by John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind educator

I think this also includes the important idea of imagining the other. Sighted people (like myself) often consider visuals the *most important* part of an experience. This isn't and can't be the case for a blind person. If you don't have sight, then the particulars about the color/expression/etc. aren't necessarily going to be important to you.

Smiling matters because it's an indicator of emotion. The quality of the teeth only matter if it's relevant to the joke. Striped shirt only matters if the text describes it as polka dots and that's the point.

Describe the parts of the image that give context, because a person whose primary mode of interpreting the world is not sight will most likely not want extraneous visual information.

As one of the blind bitches, my best advice for alt text is to lead with the main context in a single sentence summary and get more specific later if it's relevant. Alt text is read in the order it's written: if a summary is short and simple, I can know if it's something I care about listening to the whole of.

"A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge", for example, gives me the subject matter immediately - it's a photo of a cat - and the detail descends from there. Anything else in the image is coincidence or unnecessary; the photo was taken of the cat, and anything else in the frame is unimportant. The reason why the image exists should be in the first two lines - and comedic timing still works in alt text form! "A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge. A second cat is falling off a cat tree in the background." still gives that moment of realization that a build up to a joke usually would.

(Defining if it's a real thing or an illustration or a movie scene or whatever is also pretty important for context - "an illustration of a dead dove" is pretty different from "a photograph of a dead dove".)

"A sunny room with a large window and a park outside with children playing in it. There is a wide, sunny windowsill with plants on it and a cat lying next to them, looking outside" describes the same hypothetical image, but the order of it changes the importance; while it would work to establish a scene in fiction (well, clumsily worded fiction, at least) it's missing the point as alt text - the cat's the reason the photo was taken, but everything else gets described first!

I'm no expert, nor do I intend to speak for Everyone With Vision Loss Ever, but as endemiccharm said, unless the details are relevant to why the image exists, they're probably not necessary to mention! Get Shorter.

crazy that people can look at umiri and go "thats a transmasc guy" when she is literally the most transfem looking "trauma about being cut out of her friendgroups" streetwear styled cleavage showing short skirt wearing bassist ive ever seen

on the other hand though theres

wait hold on a second. im changing the topic of the post. borderline personality disorder wiki ?

they're letting just anybody order a happy meal nowadays

i saw a sad person order one a d the employees jumped the counter and poured hot oil all on him and shatteredhis ankles with spatulas

they're letting almost anybody order a happy meal nowadays

crazy how if there was no internet i literally wouldn't exist, i would have no outlet of expression except the shield i put up around others and I'd have no hope that things could ever be different. thank you internet

gf woke us both up by loudly exclaiming "WOW thats a beautiful dining room table"

usamericans looooove race science. it's their favourite thing. from identifying themselves using 19th century race science terms to racially profiling and blood quantuming latinos, it truly is one of their favourite activities right next to eating hamburger

olympic gold in hitting christian babies with a bat

points deduction. that last baby was a calvinist

oh my god people yes i know calvinism is a type of christianity the joke is that it doesn't take skill to hit a baby who's predestined to get hit come on

lrb ''soft power'' is not some indulgent luxury it is in fact the primary mechanism of empire innit

Hi! Sorry I didn't respond to your message. I got overwhelmed and my mind popped like an overloaded fuse and I turned back into a confused and disoriented 6 year old version of myself.

the eternal liberal quest for a world in which faggots are ok but poverty still exists

but i am an american so i must kill. im order to survive. if i don't kill them i will die. i don't think surviving is wrong. do you think im wrong for surviving? they deserved to die too. so i could live. did you know how difficult it was to kill? if anything i am the victim. the person i killed is gone but i have to carry these scars for my whole life. my life is a blessing on the earth don't you know why aren't you celebrating it? you must be a terrible person. i just thought about killing you.

The contemporary queer insistence to call almost any lesbian who isn’t a 1950s housewife a butch is really ignoring how hot and incredible femme muscle girls are…

have you forgotten about her?!

femme muscle girls must be allowed to flourish

Ppl just don't get it 😔😔

(Pictured, Lydia Valentín.)

walk into the local in a skirt and a guy calls me a “fucking faggot”, and i explain to him that im actually a femboy not a trans woman and he says “oh sorry lad, so you still relate to masculinity in some sort of way” and im like yeah and hes like “sorry mate” and im like ur fine honestly happens all the time and hes like “buy you a drink?” and one turns into two turns into three and he’s hilting in me in the mens and im panting and my mascara’s running and my tits are bouncing and my skirt’s up over my little estrogenated ass and he says “good girl” and i moan and he says “i fucking knew it” and clatters my head off the wall and i go down and he doesnt even have the good grace to finish on my unconscious body hes so mad. anyway can you pick me up i have a concussion

many ppl smarter than me have said this already but attacks on trans people’s personhood + attacks on immigrants’ & refugees’ personhood + attacks on disabled people’s personhood is directly connected bc both are imagined as threats to a white supremacist eugenic national body, there is a concrete reason that we are all being targeted simultaneously and dramatically and it is because fascism needs to constantly reproduce to survive

I say personhood deliberately bc we gain nothing by reifying the white supremacist & inherently exclusionistic construct of the “human”

Make no mistake. As long as the “human” is supreme. Someone will be subhuman.