Welcome back to Vile Jelly, an infrequent email newsletter / unmoored floating blog about media, disability, blindness, identitarian sub-philosophy, jargony nudity, ethics, nothics, neological pseudonymy, peaches, creatures, screen readeazzz, Google, Amazon, SEO, Ben Franklin, Franklonian Democracy, Franklonian Nudity, Spawn, Marvel, the District of Columbia, Ocean's Eleven, and so much more.
A few years ago I had dinner with a new friend who also has RP, the degenerative retinal condition I hold and cherish and monetize through incentivized blog posts like this one. (Just kidding, I am not making any money on your enjoyment of this text. Yet.) We met in a subterranean Peruvian restaurant in Washington, DC. We'd never met in person before. Meeting blind strangers is interesting for me, because while I always project ambiguity about how much I can actually see, blind people have a different attunement; they read a different menu of clues about how much vision I have. Once another new blind friend asked me if I was actually low vision, and not totally blind. When I said yes, and asked why, they replied, "B ecause you're really using the hell out of that cane!" That was shortly after I started using my white cane full-time, and I guess I was tapping with the aggressive enthusiasm of the semi-blind neophyte. At this DC dinner, my tell was the way I kept turning VoiceOver on and off. I'd turn it on because, well, it helped (still living in paradoxical twilight zone where I am able to read but it's increasingly stressful and exhausting, so I try to limit unsupported [aka silent, nontactile] visual reading as much as I can). But then I'd hit an inaccessible website— or a site that was accessible but nevertheless cluttered and hard-to-use (like the one for the restaurant we were in), and I'd turn my screen reader off, figuring it was easier to strain my vision than my screen-reader skills to find out more about the ceviche.
"I remember that period," my new friend said, hearing my phone say "VoiceOver off" for the second or third time, "when I was constantly switching my screen-reader on and off…" She had long since moved past this stage of RP. For her, turning the screen reader off means not being able to use her phone at all.
I'm still in the on-off period, but to be sure, it's staying on more and more. As a result, I find myself gravitating to more blind-friendly tech spaces. When I'm less willing to turn off my screen reader, I'm likewise less willing to tolerate sites that don't work so well with screen readers (BlueSky, for instance, may be accessible but I can't be bothered to invest time in learning its quirks, and the only times I log on are when I'm using my mouse, a sure sign that I'm doing things visually (mice are only useful if you're visually following a pointer – keyboard control is the blind way).
The social media platform Mastodon is on its face pretty unappealing to most people – I'd call it aggressively nerdy. On BlueSky, I tend to find blood-pressure-spiking news about democracy's implosion, DOGE antics, protest highlights. On Twitter there's more of the same, plus updates I didn't ask for from right-wing trolls, and sexy leftists alternating between genuinely incisive and funny interventions into the culture wars and hot selfies intended to drive traffic to their OnlyFans. Mastodon, by comparison, being algorithmless and fragmented by design, is whatever you manage to cobble together, which in my case means a handful of German media theorists, Japanese newspapers, and lots and lots of blind hackers.
But I go there more than nearly any other platform because using Mastodon with the Mona client is an absolute dream to use with VoiceOver. What, the sighted reader might be wondering, does it mean for an app to be a pleasure to use with a screen reader? The answer is not complicated. Just think of the last time you used an app without troubleshooting it, or otherwise thinking more about the app's drawbacks than the things the app was designed to let you do. If you want to scroll, it scrolls. If you want to look at something more closely, you stop and engage with that thing. That's how Mona works, every time, since I first downloaded it, without interruption. (In case it's not clear: this is rare. The rarity is what makes it so pleasurable.)
The irony is that Mastodon is, in just about every other way, significantly less user friendly than any other social platform. You can't just go to the Mastodon website, create a login, and start following people. Instead, you have to choose from one of thousands of different "servers," and it's not always intuitive, especially at first, how to follow someone who's not on your server. There's a reason why my Mastodon timeline is so much more anti-A.I., pro-Open Source, and so much blinder and more hackery than anywhere else— it's a self-selecting group of people who care about social media free from corporate algorithmic monetization and intervention, and about resistance to LLM integration, but and who also happen to be really willing to put up with some digital abstruseness if it leads to something screen-reader accessible.
This is a tension that I've been consciously and unconsciously obsessing over for the past few years: the way that, at least for blind people, but I suspect for others too, the most accessible tools paradoxically demand a pretty inaccessible immersion in technical minutia. It's a part of the larger dynamic (which I and many others have written about elsewhere) of disabled people as "the original lifehackers." It's why David Straithairn's performance as Whistler, the hacker with an electronic braille display in Sneakers (1992), is in many ways one of the more accurate portrayals of blindness in 20th-century cinema.
It's also what's led me down a marriage-straining obsession with plain text and open-source computing (Emacs, Linux, Markdown, etc.). It will be a challenge this week when I'm in conversation with Josh Miele at the New York Public Library not to derail the conversation into these brutally geeky pathways. But not to fear, Josh may be brilliant and accomplished but he's also extremely chill and funny and we're going to have a blast. It's online and in-person, tickets are here. And if you haven't picked up Connecting Dots, his wonderful memoir about, among other things, how becoming blind at a young age launched him on the journey to becoming the MacArthur "Genius" prize-winning engineer he is today, I highly recommend it!
Offline / Online
I wrote a bit about this relationship between accessibility and technicality— specifically about why I've started using the terminal (command line) on my computer, and what it has to do with blindness and interactive fiction (e.g., those old text-based adventures like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide), for the third issue of a new art magazine called The Quarterly Report. They don't put their text online, which means it's inaccessible to blind people unless they buy a copy and scan it themselves. This is something I've noticed in the world of small-press art-world independent publishing: these scrappy operations put all their energy into a print product and tend to drop the ball when it comes to accessibility. There are (to put it mildly) greater injustices in the world, but as a longtime a ficionado of weird small press poetry/art/comics/etc, becoming print-disabled has made me acutely aware of how much easier it is for me to acquire an accessible edition of a commercial/trade (or even academic) book than I can anything accessible-ish from any of the small publishers I love. Another dynamic that changes the more my screen-reader stays on: I'm becoming more of what I really want to call an access bitch: i.e., comfortable agitating and cajoling and generally being unpleasant in order to get the access I want, either for myself or others. (I thought I'd invented this term, but then I found that you can buy a Sky Cubacub– designed mask emblazoned with the phrase, which you can wear while bumping "Access Bitch" by Vogds, feat. Yung Assata.)
In the end, after the Quarterly Report gave up on figuring out a way to put my piece online (because of their commercial web hosting setup that made it impossible to do the very web 1.0 thing of uploading a .TXT file to the internet), I access-bitchily got permission to upload my piece to the internet myself.
But where should I upload it? On Mastodon, Robert Kingett (whose posts on Plain Text Accounting, the Fediverse, and other blind-hackery subjects are useful and fun to read) gave me shit for posting my writing on Substack. So in my long-term FOSS-inflected future perhaps this newsletter will migrate to Ghost or somewhere like that. (This move will be in line with the dynamic described above: the technical leveling-up I'll have to do to figure all that out will result in a net gain in access frictionlessness, since I'll at last be able to write and publish my newsletter from within my very own hyperaccessible plain-text markdown ecosystem, without fiddling with the quasi-accessible Substack interface. Plus, as Robin Sloan recently observed on his lovely not-Substack, the (plain) web, even though it lacks all the algorithmic discovery engines (and I've surely "enjoyed" the trickle of random subscribers this platform has funneled my way over the last few years), has its own far greater affordances:
the web platform… offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.
But that will take some more reading of the docs. For now, I'm just going to post this, and the aforementioned Quarterly Report piece, here on Substack. In deference to some abstract devotion to the periodical vibe of this platform, I will create a delay of some short interval (24-96 hours?) before I hit send on that one. But it will be the post after this one. See you then!