(ableism, addiction)

Alright, y'all, who wants an essay about disability? This thread is vitally important to understanding canes, crutches, wheelchairs, walkers, & any other mobility aids. Ask yourself, would you feel shame about using an aid like glasses to do this task?

1/

Would you shame me for using a wheelchair one day so I can use a single crutch the next day? Would you shame me for using a single crutch in 90% of circumstances & then using a wheelchair to navigate a convention or big event? Would you shame me for standing up from my chair? 2/
I have been shamed, verbally & to my face, for all of these things.

Mobility aids are TOOLS. There is no one right or wrong way to use a tool (just ways that might be less likely to cause injury—if you're new to crutches DM me & I can give you a tutorial).

3/
Here's another vital thing to understand. Mobility aids, wheelchairs especially, are LIBERATING. I know to many they look like a symbol of all that you'd give up as an able-bodied person, & I have also struggled with big emotions abt my chairs in childhood & coming back

4/
to my wheelchair when I was an adult. It's okay to grieve the things you lose when your body isn't able to do a thing.

But the wheelchair isn't what you think it is. The wheelchair is FREEDOM and MOVEMENT and ACCESS.

5/
I think about those memes of Steven Hawking floating out of his wheelchair after his death. I shared it that day, saw a critique, slapped my forehead, & removed it. Bc that concept gets it all wrong. What would his life have been without his wheelchair or his voice adapters?

6/
Hawking's wheelchair was a tool that let him connect with people across the world. My wheelchair is EMPOWERING.

I know a person in their 50s whose parent didn't have anyone to explain this, & thought a wheelchair was the last possible resort, to be avoided at all costs.

7/
A wheelchair probably felt like a symbol of failure. If they'd been allowed to use a wheelchair part time starting with their first injury in the 80s, they might not have spent a huge amount of their life & energy & time struggling with debilitating chronic pain & addiction

8/
as they tried to cope by self-medicating. Why was the wheelchair the evil, & not the pain that person had to endure by being forced to walk?

A mobility aid can be a lot of things to a lot of people. I don't get to tell you what it means to you, your body, & your life.

9/
I do ask you to consider that maybe the thing failing a disabled person isn't their body needing an aid to be mobile (what's more human than using a tool & adapting??) & more about the world that's full of inaccessible buildings & transports built by & for able-bodied people. 10/
(See: Senator Duckworth trying to evacuate & find a wheelchair-accessible place to lockdown during the insurrection.)

1/5 people will be disabled in their lifetimes. We're the largest & most diverse minority, bc any human can become disabled at any moment. Including you.

11/
Luckily, humans are wired as tool users. We're wired to adapt. We're wired to overcome struggle through trial and error and engineering. Mobility aids are seeing advances in technology that we couldn't have dreamed about when I got my first wheelchair as a kid.

12/
Here's the other thing to consider—the archaeological record shows that for a long, long, LONG time, humans have been wired to care for each other even w injuries that would slow down a group of hunter-gatherers for months or longer. We're wired to take care of each other.

13/
Ableism is a social construct. It's woven into western cultural narratives on independence, productivity, perfection, & who has value as a person. But it doesn't have to be that way. So many cultures treat disability differently.

14/
Wrapping up this #DisabilityActivism essay thread with my favorite @BreneBrown quote:

"You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging."

#HealingVisibly

15/15

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Some thoughts on this: Firstly, it might be personal preference, but I am not keen on this kind of campaign as I feel like it trivialises cancer. Sometimes the serious message gets lost because people are sharing pics of cats or whatever and the important context is gone.


More importantly, the statistic being used in the campaign is misleading. It says 57% of women put off cervical screening if they can't get waxed. But on further investigation, that's not accurate.

The page here goes on to say "57% of women who regularly have their pubic hair professionally removed would put off attending their cervical screening appointment if they hadn’t been able to visit a beauty salon."

So the 57% represents a concern not across the whole population of women, but only those who regularly get waxed. So how big of an issue is this across the whole population? And what else is stopping people getting smears?

I think campaigns for cancer screening are really tricky because there is so much nuance that often doesn't fit into a catchy headline or hashtag. It's certainly not easy and is part of a bigger conversation.

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.