beth

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

Guy doing the testing things responded to my concerns about privacy with "yeah, that's entirely fair"

Talking out loud to a pair of glasses feels stupid as fuck even in a room with an audience specifically for testing the glasses. I cannot imagine having to make requests of the glasses in any public space without feeling like a sellout dork on par with cybertruck owners.

Glasses accurately, but inefficiently (and imo insufficiently) described the people I was looking at, by mentioning them one by one, describing everything about their clothing in between. Maybe this is just me, but I feel like "three people standing in front of me" should be the first piece of information, not "a person in front of you with dark hair standing and wearing scrubs and white shoes holding a clipboard. A person to the left of you with long brown hair standing and wearing scrubs and white shoes. A person to the right of you-"

Glasses stop describing any time someone says anything and also, sometimes, if nothing happens at all. The wait time for it to resume is the perfect amount of seconds for it to feel awkward, which is impressive.

Glasses inaccurately described the office / eye test room I was in as a theater storage area, presumably because there was wood in it. Told it to stop doing this when it started describing everything in the room, fairly inaccurately based on this assumption.

Asked it to read a book page for me. Took three attempts at asking for it to do so. Took a picture of the page, processed, read the chapter number and three words, and stopped. Guy said sometimes you have to tell it to continue. Asked it to continue reading. It resumed describing the room from before.

How does anyone use these and think they're cool

I can see them hypothetically being an accessibility tool but honestly only if they had a keypad command input option. Having to state everything aloud is just so awkward, especially at the volume it needs to register. Like I don't want to sit in a nice restaurant and loudly instruct my glasses to read the menu to me just to get a handful of prices and no words. If there were a communication keyboard style mix and match for simple commands (or even just "read", "id", "find (option)") that could be sent and received quietly, maybe. MAYBE. but it utterly failed at the main things a low vision accessibility device is even for. AND they look stupid.

below, are four drawings of a very fluffy creature with different presentations of strabismus. they're each labelled "hypotropia (eye points downward)," "exotropia (eye points outward)," "hypertropia (eye points upward," and "esotropia (eye points inward)."

the last has an arrow, with text reading "i looked like this when i was born!"

bottom text: it's not a quirky character design, it's a real disability!

it does not mean someone is clumsy, "stupid," or autistic

(ableist depictions of autistic and/or otherwise intellectually disabled people often have strabismus. why do you think this is?)

strabismus can occur from birth, later in life due to separate visual impairments, or because of physical trauma or strokes. it can cause permanent vision issues.

i'm partially blind in one eye!

when you design a character, think about if the traits you give them exist on real people! they often do!

what do you want your art to say about disabled people?

torture getting reliable information out of people

knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour

jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact

calling the police to deescalate a situation

rafting your way off a desert island

correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes

effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else

ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences