Medical Condition: Gets Worse Without Sleep

Writing Accessibility PSA

Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!

Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?

A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.

Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!

I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]

Begging begging begging leftists... "leftists" to stop using ableism to attack fascists and people who are threats to humanity and the Earth

White supremacist #57 is not "smooth brained" or "psychotic" or "a sociopath" he is anti-human, violent, and a fascist

Stop making jokes about old politicians having strokes or having cancer or catching x y or z life-long illness because disability is not a punishment, it is a morally neutral state of being

Stop and actually think about disabled people for once. We exist. And we're not in greater leftist circles because nondisabled people never include us, never think about us, never wonder what a perfect world would be like with us in it unless they're also disabled

It okay if you want to get rid of your autism.

Lot of people on internet say that autism great and that they like it. That okay too, everyone allowed own opinion on self.

But not make you bad person if you don’t like it.

It hard having meltdowns and sensory overload. Hard to need others to care for self.

You allowed to dislike your autism.

to the disabled person who needs to hear this:

you don't have to earn or "deserve": resting, sleeping, taking your medications (including OTC meds, cannabis, creams, etc.), using your mobility aids, eating, declining to go to an event, choosing to stay home, having a self care/lazy day, or taking care of yourself in any other capacity. you can be good to yourself today.

Thinking about the dichotomy of "I feel uncomfortable/triggered in the presence of x/y/z environments I would like to be someplace without that" that I constantly see online and when I tell my therapist I really get uncomfortable when people raise their voices around me even if they aren't actually mad and her response of "you can only control your own reactions and emotions, it's not really fair to police others on how they should exist in your presence" and honestly it sucks to hear but she's right.. it's good to have people be conscientious of what triggers you but really it's up to us to do the hard work of building that emotional resilience. The idea of people around me having to be hypervigilant of what they say and do lest I start getting dysregulated does not sound fun at all, I want people to feel comfortable being themselves around me and that means training my dumb lizard brain to chill tf out. Living in a constant state of avoidance sucks ass for everyone involved.

therapists saying you're surprisingly self aware is like being called a pleasure to have in class for adults

I sure hope people don't take tiktok autism misinformation as "all these people are faking autism and being a gatekeeper is good actually" because I personally think the actual answer is "we need to learn how to discuss neurodivergencies in a way that includes nuance and doesn't overgeneralize things, we should also normalize questioning people for their sources and not taking everything at face value".

hey, disabled person! do you feel tired all the time? do you feel like you’re working twice as hard as abled people for half the outcome? do you take longer to do every single little thing than an abled person would see as reasonable? well. I would like to introduce you to the concept of crip labour (I first came across this in Smilges, 2023 but I cannot verify whether they came up with the term)

crip labour is a term to describe all the extra work disabled people do on a day-to-day basis. it’s also a form of labour that is invisible to abled people, because they just don’t have to think about most of it. it includes:

the extra labour required to get ready to leave the house in the morning (e.g. the extra steps involved in getting dressed or having a shower)

the social labour required in order to communicate your needs to abled people

the labour involved in having to plan ahead (e.g. knowing where accessible toilets are, knowing where ramp access is, knowing which venues are safe for you to be in)

the administrative labour involved in gaining access to particular institutions (e.g. applying for disability welfare, applying for education access plans, etc)

having a term to describe all the labour involved in keeping yourself alive and happy helps to make that labour more visible. it gives us a way to point out that we are doing more and with less capacity, and it helps to explain why so many of us are so exhausted all the goddamn time

so I hope this is a helpful term for people to bring into their lives!

you know what, shoutout to the neurodivergent people with "scary" symptoms.

the ones who:

-say dark things without realizing

-talk to themselves

-have homicidal thoughts

-get really, really angry

-make others uncomfortable on accident

-don't tolerate bullshit

-can't/won't mask

-have dark interests

-have genuinely hurt others before

-have been in a psych ward before

-obsess over people

-have intrusive thoughts about hurting people

-have sexual intrusive thoughts

-don't really care about others much

-always choose themselves first

-have low/no empathy

-are seen as creepy or scary by others

this goes out to my folks with autism that isn't "uwu cute". personality disorder havers. schizospec people. ocders. odd and ied havers. and anyone and everyone else.

this post does not support intentionally hurting people. but people who have hurt others in the past and have changed or are trying to change/in the process of changing are more than welcome here.

autism thing where i have to watch youtubers i generally agree with react to every drama or apology ever (multiple sources) because someone can make the worst, most manipulative and dishonest apology video, and i will watch it and go "yeah okay :3"

i just cannot detect it like at all. i will not notice anything is wrong. & then the youtuber reacting is like "look how awful that was look at all of these bad things they did in it" and every time i'm like holy shit man you're so right actually i did not see

have to be super careful about where i get my news bc i know i'm so easily influenced bc i miss out on this stuff. & i'm tired of ppl talking down on people who don't pick up on this on their own. it's not my fault. i try to educate myself by watching other ppl talk about it but if i make a mistake please just educate me don't assume i'm evil?