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There are no words in the English language I could scream to drown you out
So I got home to discover the latest code push from Dreamwidth has effectively broken the site for me. I left a comment to that effect. It does not look as though my comment will make a difference.
I understand accessibility is complicated. This journal and DW in general was one of the few things in my life right now that did not cause me active pain. It was in fact rather sustaining. That has just sharply ceased to be the case. I have no idea what to do. I left LJ for DW. I had planned to stay here until they turned out the lights because I trusted them not to hurt me. Now my eyes hurt. I am a text-oriented person who cannot comfortably interact with the text-based form of social media which is very nearly the whole of my life online. There's nowhere to go from here. (I can't even think about the effects on my Patreon.) I am tired of being a person whose needs are disposable. I am very, very, very not happy.
[edit 2020-07-26 1:21:00] I have temporarily reverted to the old style because the alternative appears to be verging on a migraine. And perhaps in a year the horse will learn to sing.
I understand accessibility is complicated. This journal and DW in general was one of the few things in my life right now that did not cause me active pain. It was in fact rather sustaining. That has just sharply ceased to be the case. I have no idea what to do. I left LJ for DW. I had planned to stay here until they turned out the lights because I trusted them not to hurt me. Now my eyes hurt. I am a text-oriented person who cannot comfortably interact with the text-based form of social media which is very nearly the whole of my life online. There's nowhere to go from here. (I can't even think about the effects on my Patreon.) I am tired of being a person whose needs are disposable. I am very, very, very not happy.
[edit 2020-07-26 1:21:00] I have temporarily reverted to the old style because the alternative appears to be verging on a migraine. And perhaps in a year the horse will learn to sing.
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The outer page of my journal looks more or less as it always has. When I look at a post itself, the font of both the post and the comments has increased in size in a way that I find simultaneously crowding and full of too much white space: it interferes with my natural method of reading, which is in blocks. Headers, usernames, and other supplementary text also look outsized and disproportionate and something about the color balance has subtly shifted in a way that I don't know I could pin down without hexadecimals but seems to be giving me eyestrain. It's not just upsetting me because it looks different. It's physically painful and I can't read just by glancing at a screen as I am used to. It reminds me of neurological tests run on me as a child. [edit: I recognize that sounded unnecessarily ominous. Some of them were IQ tests whose results I have never been told, some were psychological tests, some were sensory processing. These changes feel like someone is trying to give me a visual and/or reading disorder. They have at least succeeded in giving me a headache.] [edit edit: And horrific mood effects, apparently.] The comments box has gone deeply weird.
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(Doesn't seem to fix it in the comment box, though.)
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Thank you. I don't think it would fix all of the changes that scrambled me visually-neurologically, but it's information I hadn't had and I appreciate knowing.
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I think they should at least create a skin with as close to the old fonts and spacing as possible. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have huge text to match some accessibility standard that the rest of the internet isn't meeting (and that people will already have adjusted their browser defaults to work with).
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I would love that. I really don't want to break the rest of my internet experience in order to have only somewhat less of a problem with DW.
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https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.org/83471.html
Hopefully whatever changes they make will work for you!
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Yeah, I'm disliking the comment box.
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It was apparent from very early on that I had not come with the standard human neurophysiological wiring. I can barely remember not knowing it myself. The tests were done to figure out exactly what kind of wiring I had instead. I don't know what the clinical answer was; I don't know if there was one at the time. I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence working on the things that were harder for me than for most people and taking advantage of the things that were easier, which I realize sounds very much like the essential process of being human, but some of its manifestations were dramatic. It's one of the reasons I am now willing to describe myself as neuroatypical but do not identify on the autism spectrum because I have no idea if I would now register as such by current definitions or if I would still be classed as some other thing and in any case the diagnosis is not important to me. I have been studying the way I work my entire life. I care about information that helps me understand that. In that sense this code push has been illuminating, but I still didn't enjoy the process.
Yeah, I'm disliking the comment box.
I am sorry.
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I'm also scary good at pattern recognition, which onceuponatime in the pre-Microsoft Word era made me a really good copyeditor/proofreader. (srsly, one university publishing house I wanted to work for cleared out their editorial department after Word came on the market.)
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I do not remember being asked that question, but I see why you remember it!
(Do they?)
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