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I love these crazy Kepler kids!

#amnesty squad #amnesty #arts

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From Sep 2022.

Sketchie for a haunted AU I never got around to fleshing out.

#let's gooooo #lup #barry #barry lup #arts #balance #au

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finally got around to listening to the adventure zone and OH MY GOD i have been missing out

#taako #arts #balance

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we should talk about how accessibility is talked about on this godforsaken website

plain text and you

pt. 0: preface

"lune, why should we listen to you talk about accessibility?" i don't have formal credentials or whatever, but i've been learning about html web dev + web accessibility for years now. i read about how disabled people access the web in alternative ways from sources off-tumblr and across the web. i love semantic html a lot. i am fairly handy with a screenreader even though i'm not a regular user (currently i'm learning how to use braille screen input; my grasp of grade 2 is questionable at best and i'm slow as hell, if this gives you a sense for how much i know).

so i feel vaguely confident in throwing my two cents in.

it's also kinda hard to talk about accessibility on tumblr because of how many fucking ways you can use this site. you can be on desktop with new xkit. or with xkit rewritten or whatever it's called now. or just raw dogging the whole experience altogether. or on the mobile app. or on the mobile browser. you could be looking at someone's blog through a custom theme. these all give you different experiences that can be difficult to account for. i'm primarily a desktop user-- my knowledge in general skews toward web browsers, not mobile apps, so that's what i'm focusing on-- and i'm sighted but have the experience above.

pt. 1: plain text

i cannot emphasize enough how much plain text does not exist in the way you're defining it. plain text could refer to plain language maybe? which is when you write something so that it can be more easily read and digested.

alternatively, in computers, "plain text" refers to "text in a file on your computer that can just be read straight-up without any specialized software needed to decode it." a word doc is not plain text; if you open it up in notepad or textedit you'll see all sorts of unreadable shit. a txt file usually is plain text. if i open up the file "mobydick.txt" that i have saved, i'll see the full text of moby-dick: or, the whale and nothing else.

(in the tumblr accessibility world... i honestly have no clue how it started circulating?? or what justification's been given for it? please advise.)

this is not the end-all-be-all of accessibility. in fact, html-- which is the language for describing how web pages are displayed-- is a markup language, which means that when you write the code for a page, you mark up your plain text with how you want your text to be displayed and what you want it to mean. actually, html has standards for what all those markup tags mean, and how they should be used! then, when it gets rendered, all the markup goes away and you see this webpage.

plain text, in some ways, ignores every tool the browser gives us for access and reinvents the wheel. screenreaders already account for "big text" (tumblr refers to these as "heading level 1-2") or bold and italic text (by breaking up a sentence when it's encountered).

it's a bit more complicated than this-- sometimes plain text is necessary, ex. for those non-ascii cursive fonts or for text gradients, neither of which are handled properly by screenreaders. handled properly are the key words here. usually screenreaders handle headings, bold/italics, links-- anything that uses semantic html markup-- just fine.

if yours doesn't, i don't know what to tell you, this is literally the standard for how mainstream screenreaders work and you might've fucked with a setting somewhere.

pt. 2: you

it would help if people stopped spreading info about accessibility that's just plain untrue. a screenreader is a difficult tool to use well, actually! a lot of people talk about web accessibility and most of them are not on tumblr!! if you're looking to learn about this, i like webaim as a resource-- they have fairly well-written pages and it's a fun rabbit hole to go down.

there are easy steps for making your internet presence more accessible-- writing alt text, knowing what to avoid-- but the truth is, learning about accessibility is work. you have to put in effort to know what tools people have at their disposal, to learn how people use their machines. i've been at this for years! and i still wouldn't call myself an expert.

i also think everyone who talks about accessibility should read against access, a beautiful piece about finding different possibilities for accessibility from a DeafBlind protactile user:

We would do well to abandon the pretense that it’s possible to reproduce base things in realms other than those that gave birth to them. Instead, we can leave those things well alone where they belong, or, moved by possibilities, we can transgress, translate, and transform them. We can give foreign things new purposes, which may be slightly or extremely different from their original intent.... Our environment has endless potential for life. For centuries, however, much of our vitality was forbidden. We were forced to stick with the effects of the hearing and sighted world. Now, though, we are all in varying stages of flight.

for me, accessibility features like alt text are not tools for providing an "equivalent" experience. it provides another fully distinct way of encountering a photo, a webpage, a space...! and deserves to be thought of as one. more bluntly: screenreader users won't have the same needs as non-sr users and vice versa, and conflating the two is a disservice.

if you're able to and interested, please take some time to learn about this! it'll be better spent than putting down posts on tumblr.

#actually let me queue this here also #since taz has a higher concentration of people interested in accessible work wrt what i see in my tumblr sphere

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well now i need a Dungeon Meshi/The Adventure Zone crossover comic with a cultural exchange program where one side brings healthy, meticulous fantasy!Japanese cuisine and the other side brings the most atrocious processed fantasy!American garbage with an ingredients list full of arcane curses

#yells #balance #crossover #dungeon meshi

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thirst warm-ups

#d20 #fh #fhjy

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excerpts from the journals

#oh cute... #lucretia #magnus #taako #lup #the twins #davenport #short comics #balance

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build-a-body!!

(sid's clear torso is an idea originally done by @lightningidle, in this art piece!)

[id in ALT!]

#d20 #aso #arts

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jk she’s fine, y’all

#lup #arts #balance

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can we make a blood pact but platonically. just as friends. we haven’t been doing much bonding lately :(

#double prev taako & barry #LMAO #taz vibes

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Telemaine stop bullying him

#d20 #fh #fhjy #animation

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Boy I do love watching the eclipse, I sure hope no cacophonous sound knocks my friends unconscious and no eyes of a terrible extradimensional force show up in the Ethereal Plane to start a ticking countdown to the world's doom!

#yeah i got to see a total eclipse years back and like #this is literally what it felt like #all i could think abt was the world turning grey feeling like how the apocalypse is described in taz...

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maybe some fluffy blupjeans cuddles pwease...... i love them so mcuh

you and me both anon!!!

#lup #barry #arts #barry lup #balance

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Salt gobs!!! I love their rumpus and mayhem 💚

#salt goblinssss #d20 #acofaf

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sleepover

#lup #taako #arts #balance #love ur style op...

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miss these bitches on god

#barry #arts #balance

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i just think that she'd pose holding a blinkshark like those straight dudes on tinder do with a bass

#amber #arts #ethersea #god. yeah.