JUST DOIN' GOD'S WORK

I’m a bisexual indigenous trans man. And on tumblr I feel the pressure to constantly say that, lest some jerk decide that because they disagree with me I MUST be some white cis dude who’s out of line for having an opinion. Do you really think that attitude helps marginalized people? It just makes us feel stressed, anxious, and like we’re going to be attacked by our own communities.

There’s a lack of compassion and nuance on tumblr when it comes to understanding the differing opinions of people within your own community. This attitude doesn’t help.

It also becomes a real problem in regards to LGBT identities. What if someone is closeted and doesn’t want to risk someone from their real life finding their tumblr? They shouldn’t have to feel like they have to come out on their about page.

In fandom people often demand to know whether someone is a sexual assault survivor when discussing fandom issues. Should a survivor have to disclose their personal pain like that?

I get that white people talking like they know shit about racism & colonialism is annoying. But I don’t think the solution to that is to make other POC & indigenous people afraid of what will happen if they don’t list all the details of their race and ethnicity.

Tumblr Accessibility UI Update Toggle

This is a userscript for Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey that will disable the new UI update by default, and add a toggle to re-enable/disable it in your Dashboard settings page.

Everything is reverted to how it was before the update and there’s no delay on page load.

Make sure you have Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey installed on your browser, it is needed to be able to load the script.

Install the script from here:

Why?

Because there’s no delay on page load.  …which means there’s no brief flash of the dark background and saturated icons.

these are my settings:

this is what it looked like originally

this is what it looks like now, with light mode on and -30 contrast

Some time ago we took a long, hard look at how we stacked up to the recommendations outlined in the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. This is the initiative that sets standards for accessibility for people who may need assistance using the internet. It outlines steps to take and tools to use to create as seamless of an experience online as possible, whether you have auditory, visual, or neurological disabilities, are using a limited device, are on a slow connection with limited bandwidth, or…well, a whole bunch of other reasons.

The result of that long, hard look? Not great. We needed to make sure Tumblr was accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been making changes to do just that. Our inaccessible menus are more accessible, we fixed our poorly described elements, and increased overall readability. You can read more about all that in our most recent @javascript post about the mobile web.

Part of making Tumblr more accessible involved upping the color contrast in our UI, most notably on the dashboard and everywhere else that familiar blue touches. The light grays and muted blues had a contrast ratio of 2.02:1. What does that mean? Bad. It was bad, and we needed to do better by people with visual impairments.

Enter your new dashboard:

It looks…cleaner, doesn’t it? Like someone dusted off the poorly accessible bits. The blue is darker, the grays are lighter, all the buttons and icons are brighter with our new brand colors, and it has a contrast ratio of 7.87:1 What does that mean? Good! Very good.

The switch to your brand new, higher contrast, less dusty dashboard has been slowly rolling out this week. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll get it sometime in the next few days.

A note: We know that this color change on the dashboard negatively impacts the beautiful bluespace art so many of you have created over the past few years. Seeing these older posts lose the utilization of the dashboard—something that made them so special and unique to just Tumblr—is certainly not a great feeling. There’s no way around that. We hope, however, that this change only means newer, more bluespace art will be created, and that this time around it will be easier for everyone to experience.

Stories need conflict.

Write them to show what’s healthy. Write them to show what’s unhealthy.

Write them because problematic behaviors exists, and writing is a medium to explore and show– to teach and make the reader think. Shying away from these topics only creates ignorance. 

I see so many people telling writers to avoid anything that could be problematic, like writing about it is supporting it. They fail to see the importance of writing with depth and meaning. 

TO GET RID OF THIS:

DO THIS;

AND HIT REPLACE ALL