how to be accessible
accessibility discourse drives me mad (sometimes).
it follows the same ragebait logic of other online discourses which is to say someone says something regrettably stupid and a thousand thousand replies come along and finally to put the final nail in the coffin there's discourse about the discourse.
just in case i've not made myself clear i find this outrage/gossip loop infuriating. to me it's find to note that someone said something stupid and move on after explaining why it was stupid. if it's something that's happening regularly then maybe it's worth diving in a bit more. just avoid pileons.
"deserves more discussion" is where i put "bean soup theory". because it ties into ultraindividualistic and algorithmically-driven myopia and because we see it often.
but then there's something i think is--right now at least--in pileon territory. this is the accessibility = dumbing down.
i've seen a couple instances of this recently. one is from booktok (of course it is; discussing books on a shortform video streaming platform generates predictably bad takes about bad books) where someone says something along the lines of "you shouldn't use words in your books that no one knows".
the other is from the blogosphere where someone says something along the lines of "you shouldn't use local idioms that i don't understand".
both of these are fundamentally stupid takes. they get accessibility all wrong. accessibility at least classically is about removing barriers to access or adding accomodations for access. it is not about considering every single audience that has ever existed or could ever exist. [now that i think of it this actually has a lot of crossover with beansouping!]
it is not possible for instance to write an academic paper that a five year old can understand without losing something. there's technicality/precision to certain language which you simply have to learn how to understand. asking for eli5-everything in the name of accessibility is doing violence to the idea of accessibility and somewhat more importantly the actual people who need actual accomodations.
you presumably have a device with a search engine that can look stuff up right? so what you're really asking for here is for every piece of work to require as little effort as possible for you. for you. you may wrap that up in this pretense that there is some imagined other person or group that would be helped by whatever intervention you're proposing--but let's be real here. it's about you.
frankly there is a tonne of stuff written for every audience. if you don't want to be challenged in any way go read some stuff in a genre that's designed not to challenge you in any way. [i will avoid naming any particular genres but just imagine the sort of book booktok might recommend and read that!]
accessibility is not about removing any and all effort in your life. just fyi.