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?

Anyways! HERE'S YOUR HANDY GUIDE TO WHAT CAN COUNT AS EYESTRAIN! I'm pulling this straight from the Artfight rules page about what needs to be labeled and filtered as eyestrain because it's VERY helpful and VERY accurate! I also know not everybody has an AF account and might not always have access to this handy guide, and this is an important resource; That's why I'm sharing it here! (under the cut)

PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!

image 1: table titled Cheat Sheet. On the left is the Needs Filtering column, which contains the following items: Large amounts of bright colors, including backgrounds; High contrast bright colors; Chromatic abberation; Optical illusions; Fast-flashing or bright animations; and Intense glowing effects. On the right is the Doesn't Need Filtering column which contains the following: Small amounts of bright colors, Slow flashing animation (under 3 per second), and Minor glowing effects.

image 2: A set of 6 examples under the title Visual Guide to Eyestrain filters. All use the same base drawing of a grey person with big eyes. The first is labelled Small amounts of bright colors with a check mark under the title. The person has a splash of cyan on one hand and a splash of magenta on one leg. The second is labelled High contrast or bright colors with a warning sign under the text. The person has stripes of bright contrasting colours across the torso. The third is labelled Bright/neon backgrounds with a warning sign under the text. The person is standing in front of a magenta rectangle. The fourth is Chromatic abberation or glitch effects with a warning sign under the text. On one side of the body there is a magenta outline with horizontal glitch lines into and out of the body. On the other side the same style with cyan. The fifth is Intense glow with a warning sign. The person's eyes and heart have a large bright cyan glow effect around them. The final is Clashing patterns & optical illusions, with a warning symbol. The person has a black, yellow and cyan checker-board pattern on one leg and a spiral optical illusion pattern on one arm.

I just realised how much meme culture is visually focused & even though there are some that only involve text/sound, you’re still left with a big chunk of memes you can’t interact with?????

It’s honestly such a good question. I have a lot of thoughts about this actually because yeah, I do often feel like I am just totally not in the no on various memes. I am not completely blind, but I do not remotely have enough vision to interpret them without image descriptions.

The long and short of it is, if I’ve never seen that meme described before, I have no idea what it is or what it’s supposed to mean. This is actually an occasional frustration of mine when people are writing image descriptions for memes, because some people doing those descriptions will rely on the blind reader already understanding the original context of the meme and so they will leave out all of the important information that makes the meme what it is. For example, they might just say “the Spider-Man pointing meme but with character X and character Y,” without actually describing what the Spider-Man pointing meme is or what it looks like or why it’s funny.

When this happens, a lot of blind readers are just left feeling lost. I think there is sometimes an assumption that because everyone else on Tumblr is probably very familiar with this thing because they see it visually all the time, blind users must also be familiar with it because it’s everywhere, but chances are that only a very VERY small fraction of the instances of that meme have included alt text or image descriptions which means that when someone does describe it, that might be a blind user’s very first experience of that meme in an accessible format. That might be the very first version they’ve ever seen that they can interact with or understand, and so leaving out important information based on an assumption that everyone already knows what this meme is can perpetuate the issue. It’s probably a well meaning assumption that we know what those memes are, or maybe sometimes it’s just laziness, but either way it does often mean that we still don’t get to understand what that meme is because we probably don’t have that baseline understanding of it already.

I suppose this post is a bit of a PSA to image describers then lol. If you are writing a description for a meme, your first sentence can certainly still be a shortened overview because people who do already know it will appreciate getting to the point and those of us who don’t will appreciate learning that this is called the Spider-Man pointing meme, but your next sentence should always be to describe what the meme actually is and how it works so that blind readers can fully understand what’s happening in it if we have never encountered that meme format before.

Anyways, image description gripes aside, it is definitely true that we sometimes miss out on quite a bit of meme culture because of accessibility. I can’t tell you how many TikTok trends I just don’t have any conception of because there is no sound apart from a specific song or specific sound being reused with different visuals each time. I’m sure there are all sorts of visual video trends I don’t even know exist because all I can hear is the song.

Granted, I still get to interact with plenty of text based meme culture as well as the verbal kind, blind people definitely don’t just not understand meme culture in general because they’re certainly are still plenty that are perfectly accessible, but there is certainly a very large portion of inaccessible visual meme culture that we do tend to miss out on. I can’t tell you the number of discord servers I just straight up leave less than 24 hours after joining because sometimes the culture in a server involves conversations being like 50% meme gif sharing. I will often advocate for image descriptions in spaces I join, but when it’s clear that that’s the dominant method of interaction, that is honestly too much work for one person to try and shift the culture of a place like that so I will usually just leave.

I love that you brought this up because yeah, sure at the end of the day it’s not exactly the biggest problem we deal with, but it is a thing that does have real impacts on how we interact in online spaces especially. Even in person, there is nothing more awkward than hanging out with several friends and one of them showing a meme to everyone else while they all laughed together, but not describing it for you, so you are just left feeling like you are no longer part of that moment. It’s definitely something that can make it a little bit harder to hang out in largely sighted spaces, and on the Internet, it can make an entire community feel unreachable for us.

I see so many posts from other disabled people who aren’t blind talking about how the Internet has served as a sort of unifying safe space for them, how the Internet has provided them access to things they never had before, because even if there isn’t an accessible entrance to a restaurant or something, they can still go online and have a bit of a break from all that. And as a wheelchair user myself, I wish that it could be that for me. But with blindness, it just isn’t that way, because so much of the Internet is image based and so little of it is made accessible, so the Internet is often just as hostile and inaccessible to us as the real world, if not more so. I have even been part of actual disabled online groups that also refused to provide image descriptions but still insist on sending plenty of memes and gifs, because apparently everybody except blind people are welcome.

Drew more cat because I'm sick and needed some serotonin :/

The Falcon by Shark Dad

/entirely inspoed by this post !/

(id in alt)

"*****smut marked with asterisks so you can skip!*****""

Don't. Don't do this.

You let readers know what your fic contains through proper tagging and rating. Content warning notes at the top of the chatter are also great. You can even summarize key "this is the plot relevant stuff you missed of you're skipping this chapter" notes at the bottom too! This is a much smoother reading experience.

This is HELL on screen readers which is a disability access issue. Screen readers will read out every single asterisk you put, which I have seen done as entire page breaks. It's an awful reading experience. Please just don't.

Readers do not need their hands held through the reading experience. If they're enjoying the fic but don't care for smut, they can just skim until it gets interesting again. If they REALLY don't like smut, you warned them. There's a back button. You don't have to do a special song and dance isolating out the specific parts you think might be "icky". (If you think those bits are icky and don't like writing them, consider just don't! Fanfic is a hobby we do for fun and you don't have to write anything you don't find enjoyable. There's plenty of readers for gen fic and smut free ship fic).