Open Society

A computer environment removes some of the most difficult aspects of communication and makes it much more achievable. Role playing games can help develop more pragmatic skills; many are available to play online, or they can be played without a computer using special packs of cards. The events which are virtually experienced have many shared properties with real life events; they will call forth the same emotional reactions and present the same sorts of issues and opportunities in a sphere of mutual interaction and cooperation. But these events have clear and explicit rules, and the relationships do not have to outlast the game, although they may, because of course real people are playing. So these may be a fruitful source of social skills for linguistically able autistic children in a relatively manageable, non-rejecting and just social climate.

Good alt text means that screen reader users get the same 'meaning' from the page as a fully sighted user.

The relevant parts of an image aren't limited to the cold hard facts. Images can make you feel a particular way, and that's something that should be made available to a screen reader user.

"Emotion matters" really changed how I think about writing alt text. Léonie wrote a longer article on the idea, which I recommend reading.

We believe good ideas can come from anywhere. Communication is our oxygen, and we communicate frequently.

It’s been 13 years since the original Disability Justice Collective — made up of activists Patty Berne, Leroy Moore, Mia Mingus, Sebastian Margaret and Eli Clare, a group of queer Black and Asian, queer and trans white disabled people — came together to coin the term “disability justice” and lay the groundwork for a movement-building framework of intersectional, revolutionary disability politics. Sick of single-issue, casually racist white-dominated disability rights movements on the one hand, and of non-disabled Black and Brown movements forever “forgetting” about disability on the other, they decided to create some kind of luscious, juicy movement that would be like what environmental justice was to environmental rights, but in a disability context. This work has been carried on by organizations like Sins Invalid and the Harriet Tubman Collective, and many individuals and unnamed collectives doing visible and also highly invisibilized work.

You want to know how you’ll know if you’re doing disability justice? You’ll know you’re doing it because people will show up late, someone will vomit, someone will have a panic attack and nothing will happen on time because the ramp is broken on the supposedly “accessible” building. You won’t meet your “benchmarks,” on time or ever. Disability justice means people with disabilities taking leadership positions, and everything that means when we show up as our whole selves, including thrown-out backs or broken wheelchairs making every day a work-from-home day, having a panic attack at the rally, or needing to empty an ostomy bag in the middle of a meeting. It means things moving slowly and being led by people even the most social-justice-minded abled folks stare at. And what holds many social justice abled folks back from really going there is that our work may look like what many abled people have been taught to think of as “failure.” It’s so easy to look at a list of disability justice principles and nod your head. But the real deal is messy and beautiful — as messy and beautiful and real as our sick, disabled, Deaf and crazy body/minds. Disability justice, when it’s really happening, is too messy and wild to really fit into traditional movement and nonprofit-industrial complex structures, because our bodies and minds have always been too wild to fit in those structures. And that is on purpose: Nonprofits, created in the ’60s to manage dissent, have much overlap with “charities” — the network of institutions designed to institutionalize and control disabled people. Changing work to really embody disability justice means throwing out most ways people have learned how to organize.