Salutations, Friends!

I really wanted to talk about this as I’d seen it come up and start to spread a lot a bit ago. The topic is that using fancy fonts on especially social media is abelist because screen readers sound like a blender murdering a xylophone when trying to read that text.

First thing I want to address is that the frustration and loneliness that can come from seasons where a trend pops up and now these sites are torturous to go through when they have been key to finding community… that’s absolutely miserable. But the issue I have with labeling this abelist is that it dismisses any reason that a person might use fonts as being meaningless, gimmicky, and/or shallow. But in reality, though a medium not typically associated with it’s visual appeal, there are many industries/ studies/ careers that do have a lot of weight and care in how a font makes a viewer feel/what it makes them think.

Marketing is a huge one, from product design, to ads, to book covers there are many instances where font has a major impact on perception. And I’m not using this as an example of why people should be able to use fonts. I am using it as evidence of histories of research that has been put into showing that fonts do have an impact on people, so not all cases are just some silly thing.

Jumping off from that is the actual art of it. The art inbedded in intentional decisions behind the visual appearance of text. It is in calligraphy, graphitti, comics, and (most meaningful to me) poetry. It is pretty common in a poetry book to see text distorted, shifted, and changing in font. It is part of the art. And as a writer who started in poetry, that has been one of the things that has stuck with me and shaped me the most. It is part of how I communicate and how I express.

But it is a form of communication and art that is less acknowledged and I think that’s why dismissing it has started to gain some traction. Whereas a while ago, people had been saying the same thing about emojis (again, because screen readers would sound like a robot was getting the electric chair directly in your ear). But with that it was a lot harder to deny the use of emojis as tools of communication, so people couldn’t get as much support.

Here is where I argue that in some of these conversations about acessibility/ representation, we start to creep into something close to entitlement by denying the concept of compatibility. But it gets very complicated and nerve wracking when talking about historically oppressed and ostracized groups.

To get a better idea of what I mean, I want to talk about a similar issue I saw come up. It was the idea that there is something wrong with a person that doesn’t want to date a sex repulsed ace person because they like sex. (I.e. They’re brain washed, they’re obsessed with sex, they can’t feel good by themselves.)

Key point, I am fairly certain that this is some op shit/dog whistling. But the logic behind it is very similar to what I see in the discussion about fonts so thatcs why I’m bringing it up.

Just like before it sucks to get rejected, pushed away, and othered because of major parts of who you are. But at the same time, the arguement only stands if you dismiss (and even demonize) every reason a person might enjoy and want to continue having sex with a partner (which is fundamentally different from masturbation). Do I think that more people need to have more meaningful introspection about what sex means to them and why they do/don’t have it? Yes. But at the end of the day it is reasonable to enjoy sex and it’s reasonable for that to make you incompatible with someone that is not interested in having sex and is not comfortable with non manogamy.

So going back to the topic of fonts. I absolutely think more people should be aware that fancy fonts sound like Hal 9000 sitting in a bathtub with a toaster so they can recognize if those fonts just don’t mean much to them. But I think it’s important to acknowledge the art that fonts are and allow people in their personal spaces (which no matter how public social media is, it is still for most people a personal space) to express themselves.

What we should do in turn is gather as a group and demand answers from the powers that be because there is just no reason for this to technologically be an issue.

Like, most of these fonts aren’t new, and even the ones that are… why does it seem like it’s not possible to add those in the same way that you would add a font to any other program? My keyboard recognizes that shape as an A so why can’t the screenreader?

To be clear, I have no Idea how these readers actually work, but I very much believe that the real problem, the real bottle neck of the situation, is the tech and there is no reason why the tech is this far behind aside from abelism/ medical and disability tech aiming to make disabled people seem less disabled (better eye surgery) rather than make tech directed at making their current lives easier.

Maybe I’ll come back to this all once I’ve done some research on screen readers, but for now…

It feels like some people are pushing this idea that we all should be together and if you can’t constantly share space with this or that person it’s because you’re descriminatory. But there’s nothing inherently abelist about conflict. And at the end of the day if we get beyond all of the isms, all the bigorty, all the patriarchy, and the judgement, there will still be general incompatibility and we need to leave space for that nuance when pushing forward.

Thank you so much for reading.

Until Next Time…

Valedictions, friends.