He’s also not a racist!

I managed to go all of 22-28 never once being carded for anything.

When I hit 30 I started getting carded for things I’d never been carded for before, even the milk bar I’d bought smokes at for 10 years, same guy and his son running it, suddenly started carding me.

That’s how I learned the ID that I’d been carrying around for 10-11 years since getting my photo ID in highschool was functionally useless, because hardly anywhere would accept it as legal ID despite it being legal ID.

I had to keep the website for the government list of ID boolmarkef so I could show doubtful cashiers that my ID was indeed federally accepted, legal and valid ID.

I went to try and get a different type of ID last year which is how it found out that despite being born in my country to a citizen of my country, and having my birth recorded and receiving my birth certificate. Somehow I’m not actually a citizen of my own country and I can’t get a passport…so I’m trying to navigate that system but that’s extra fun and confusing because I have neurodevelopmental issues and no one to help me understand what I need to to do.

I just want to be able to buy alcohol as a person in their 30s, without having to jump through impossible hoops to prove that I’m not not 17.

I’ve got smile lines and the beginnings of crows feet, I am weathered! Why am it getting carded now

I guess my question would be, why do you need the picture as a visual aid, is the accompanying body text confusing without that visual aid? and if so, by having no alt text, you accept that you will leave VI people confused and only sighted people will have the clarification needed.

If your including a picture of a table with nothing on it, there’s a reason, so yes, that alt text is perfectly reasonable.

Personally I wish there was a way to enable two types of alt text on images, for long and quick context.

Because I understand your concern about unnecessary detail, if I’m in a rush “a table with nothing on it” will do for quicker context, but there are times when it’s appropriate to go much deeper, “a picture of a hard wood rustic coffee table, taken from a high angle, natural sunlight, there are no objects on the table.”

As a visually impaired person on the internet. YES! welcome to our world!

You’re lucky enough to get an image description that helpfully describes the image.

That description rarely tells you if it’s AI generated, that’s if the description writer even knows themselves.

Everyone in the comments saying “look at the hands, that’s AI generated”, and I’m sitting here thinking, I just have to trust the discussion, because that image, just like every other image I’ve ever seen, is hard to fully decipher visually, let alone look for evidence of AI.

Accessibility.

We will never get rid of the analogue clocks from our school, we’re an adult education and alternative model highschool qualifications centre.

We primarily teach adults with no to low English, adults and teens with disabilities, and adults and teens refered via corrections services.

There is a significant level of illiteracy within numeracy, and for some of our students, it’s not a failing of the education system, it’s just a fact of life given their specific circumstances (eg, acquired brain injuries are common among our students)

Some students can learn to tell time on an analogue clock even if they didn’t know before.

But even my students who will never in their life be able to fully and independently remember and recall their numbers can tell the time with an analogue clock.

I tell my students “we will take lunch at 12pm, so if you look at the clock and the arms look like this /imitates a clock/ we will go to lunch”

And now I avoid 40 questions of “when’s lunch?” because you don’t need to tell time to see time with an analogue clock, they can physically watch the hands move, getting closer to the shape they recognise as lunch time.

And my other students can just read the time, from the clock, and not feel infantalised by having a disability friendly task clock like they’ve done at other centres I work at - they’ve had a digital clock for students who can tell time, and a task clock as the accessible clock. But a well designed face on an analogue clock can do both.

I myself have time blindness due to a neurological/CRD issue, so analogue clocks, and analogue timers are an accessibility tool for me as well, as the teacher.

orientated

Is this common in American English? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word oriented double handled like that. Irregardless, it slew me

Exactly! I have a genetic illness that caused congenital deformities and injuries and disability later in life, starting around my teens thanks to puberty.

From an early age my relationship with work was distorted because I found myself trapped in the gap between two pathways. I was obviously capable of work, with the right treatment and support I had a lot of potential. But I was disabled, and I required expensive supports and medical intervention, and under the public healthcare system there reaches a point of disability and limitations in capacity that you are written off by the system. Shoved in a residential group home, given a pension below the poverty line, and expected not to try. (genuinely, we’re expected not to try, if someone on a disability pension works a job, they can loose their pension, which is many cases is also tied to housing and access to medical services)

I’d flip between the two systems, I’d have a great few months with regular access to treatment, I’d get a job plan from the dole office, I’d sit through work readiness courses, I’d be getting healthier and looking forward to working and being a good little contributor to society. Then I’d hit a waiting list for my medical care, my health would slip, I’d be re-assessed by the welfare department and deemed too disabled to work, my job plan would be shredded and I’d get a pension support plan. Then I’d get to the top of the wait list, resume treatment, and get back to getting to work.

I didn’t start a “real job” until I was 24, it was a call centre gig and I near killed myself trying to do it.

It wasn’t even hard. It was a true 9-5 (no overtime, no bullshit) and you mentally didn’t need to bring any of it home with you. It was easy for me, but my body decided it was too much. My health suffered and it took years to fully recover, with me barely pulling myself together here and there for gig work in between being bounced on and off the disability pension system.

The whole endeavour was far more expensive to tax payers than a system like UBI. Processing my case 70 times because the disability support, and employment support eligibility requirements are so strict and the lines between streams so black and white took a lot of administrative resources.

I’ve been in my current industry for 10 years this November. I work part time, 12-20 hours a week depending on my health. I’m highly successful in my field because I’m working within my body and mind’s means and playing to my strengths. I’m a whole person with a life outside work and I bring that range of experiences to my job, enriching what I bring to my organisation - which is good, because my job is a mutual exchange between me and my employer, it’s not exploitive towards me the worker, which further prevents burn out for me.

But we exist within the capitalist system of funding and our wages are set by the department of health and human services. I make $34,000AUD a year and it’s not enough to survive.

But if I work any harder my body will not survive.

I’m asking to do what I can do for my community, while living a safe existence… Not being forced to choose between litteraly breaking my back working for someone else’s greedy profit, or starving in a tent (though realistically, a lot of people are doing both)

I’m hard of hearing and terrified of standing in the wrong place at an airport and missing the visual cues to board the flight. Once boarding starts and people start queueing up, I usually get in line because it’s helpful to see what everyone in front of me is doing - the order that they hand over paperwork or get carry on double checked. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to hear the attendant if they ask me questions at the gate because it’s so noisy, so I like to at least feel like I’m prepared.

One time I was flying with crutches and qualified for early pre-boarding because I needed the plane wheelchair (skychair). I sat right next to the gate desk and waited, then I started seeing people queue up so I quickly joined the line, wondering how pre-boarding works when the whole plane of passengers are already vying to be at the front of the line.

I get to the front, the attendant looks at my ticket then after some awkward back and forward eventually I realised they were telling me I’ll have to wait till everyone has boarded to get the sky-chair on. I should have come to the desk when pre boarding was announced. I pointed that I was sitting right in front of them… Apparently they were called my name 3 times over the loudspeaker.

Apparently airports can only comprehend one disability at a time (if that!) they knew I was hard of hearing (it’s on my ticket) but still thought calling me over the PA was the best way to get the attention of the deaf person sitting 80cm from their desk.

So I sat back down and waited for the line to clear, then I got back up when there were 2 people in line, and after another back and forward I learned that they had tried calling my name again about halfway through boarding because they only had one skychair and it was now or never because the chair had told fly with the other passenger because their arrival airport didn’t have a chair, or something, I dunno, anyway I kind of had to crawl down the ailse to get to my chair because in the past I’ve just used the backs of chairs to swing myself along, but the plane was full so I couldn’t do that.

“body type” has always been a general term to express the entire shape, size and proportions of a person, including excess weight and obesity.

When I was obese I couldn’t pull off crop tops because of my body size, it was incredibly unflattering, and now that I’m a healthy weight I still can’t pull off crop tops because of my body proportions, I have a short torso.

Body type encompasses both scenarios, so it’s often thought of as a polite way to tell someone something is unflattering without singling out specific “flaws” in their body.

Yup, that’s what the meds are called.

The only reason I’d ever use a brand name is if I genuinely need a specific brand (I have allergies so there are some brands I can’t have because of the inactive ingredients they use) or if I physically can’t pronounce the generic name.

Diclofenac is a prime example. No matter how many times I study the word and practice, I can’t stop myself from saying “dick flen ick” when I get to the chemist. Which is just so wrong. So I ask for “the generic Voltaren”

But I’m also just as likely to ask for a drug by its class if I can’t pronounce the name.

Eg: the beta blockers I used to be on, I’d have to think really, really hard to say “Propranolol” because otherwise I’d end up accidentally saying “propofol”. Not too big of a deal because obviously If I’m picking up a prescription for Propranolol and I ask for propofol the pharmacist is just going to chuckle and correct me. But to avoid it I’d just say “I’m here to pick up a my beta blocker script for, [name] [birthdate]”.

This is a case where the brand name actually unites understanding of a drug whose chemical name differs by location.

Except we don’t have Tylenol in most countries where it’s called paracetamol.

We have Panadol, Panamax, Calpol, Herron and Hedanol.

If it wasn’t for ER, Scrubs, Greys Anatomy and a bunch of other American media, I’d have no idea that Tylenol and acetaminophen are the same thing as Panadol and paracetamol.

Standard Tylenol and standard Panadol are different dosages too. Regular strength Tylenol is 325mg, standard Panadol (and every other paracetamol brand I’ve seen for adults) is 500mg, which is the “extra strength” of Tylenol.

I’m an IT teacher at a community centre, I genuinely never thought I would see the day when a student younger than me enrolled. I wrongly assumed my role as a public educator would just fade out as younger generations required generally less training around computers.

Obviously courses in disability service centres would remain, and accredited training for people to kick off or retarget their careers would still exist.

But the person at the local library who meets twice a week and teaches grandma how to close the tabs on her phone felt like a job that was destined to die.

I’m in my 30s and this year I have a few teenagers in my class. The conversations are hilarious, they don’t know how to read a file location adreess or open a program that isn’t pinned to the taskbar, but at the same time, I don’t know how to access the notifications bar on an iPhone or quickly find the wifi settings without going through general settings…because I went from windows to 98, to a blackberry, to an Android, just like they went from an ipad toddler to an iPhone teen, and only now are they having Windows 11 thrown at them, and of all the computers to try and learn to use, this wouldn’t be my first recommendation (but it’s what our government funds us to teach 🤷‍♀️)

The skill divide is so hard to explain too. My elderly students just stare blankly at one screen, overwhelmed and confused, unsure how to recognise anything. Nothing stands out as a link, or a click able button, because the entire visual landscape is new to them. There is often a lot of hand holding which can be frustrating especially when you made a huge breakthrough in their confidence and independence only to have come in the next week feeling insecure about their skills because they’ve forgotten a little bit, or had a bad spam caller over the weekend who made them want to never touch a computer again.

Then the teens, who know what links look like and generally what they do will rush ahead, they may not know what it is exactly they’re trying to do, but they think they know what end result is expected and they generally know how to avoid catastrophic issues so they just barrel ahead, I’ll see them make 40 clicks a second for something that usually takes 2, because they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.

I had a project last week. Dead simple. Save a linked file to a target location, import the file into another program through either drag and drop or browsing for the file, then change 1 thing, and export the final file into another target location, as specified on the activity sheet.

Barely 5 minutes in, I’m still helping Brenda get her mouse dongle plugged in, and one of the teens is finished. And yes, they have every file I asked for, and every edit I asked for, but both are just sitting in the downloads folder. And now we’re at the end looking back, the teen is confused because they have the edited file that is required to "finish*, how is it wrong, and I’m trying to explain why skipping the steps about target locations means they’ll have to start again because this activity is all about target locations and I don’t actually give two shits about this file I just need them to put things in and out of a folder until they can explain to me “a folder is a container” and not just stare into space because a folder is a black hole on their phone things they save go to until they need them again and just download them again.

Oddly I think parties like this would be more beneficial to the child.

If my parents had thought to have a joint mobility party for me, then maybe my hip joint deformity would have been found in infancy, when it’s treatable, and not when I was 17 after years of being told I had “growing pains”.

I mean, I’d be confused and concerned too if a time travelling European from the 18th century stepped off a boat in 1492