Back in January when I decided to start blogging again, I didn’t really have a plan. I chose the words “humanity, community, story” as the motivation for the blog and the tagline of my website because I wanted to bring a little corner of those things to the internet, whether anyone read them or not. Since then, these Tuesday posts have largely been for me but also featured some thoughts on books and writing (my areas of expertise), as well as a smattering of other topics about which I am less knowledgeable. Sometimes, the topic literally plopped into my head Tuesday morning. Other times, I knew from the Wednesday before.
Today, though, feels a bit different. It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time (my whole life, really), but it became a potential blog topic yesterday. Then, when I found this post’s image right away and it was exactly the right size for my theme’s featured image area, it felt like a sign.
I neither broadcast nor hide that I have some pretty significant vision loss (though, I suppose I’m broadcasting it now). I don’t know if this is a reason I got into working with words, since they were always more accessible, especially once ebooks came along, but whether it is or not, one of the fantastic things about working with stories is that I don’t need to see to understand them. Stories permeate across boundaries, rather like music (another area I got heavily into, particularly in school). Long story short, I love working with fiction because it’s something I can do without a ton of barriers getting in the way.
At least, the actual fiction itself is like that. Some of the fiction-adjacent things, not so much.
For example, this website. I built it and maintain it more or less independently. No, I did not code it from scratch, but I have enough html, css, and other understanding to do what I want to do when there isn’t a point-and-click option available. If I’m making major changes, I’ll ask someone with fully functioning eyeballs to have a look, and most of the time, everything turns out fine.
And sometimes, the thing I wanted to do came out fine, but turns out, there’s something else weird happening I didn’t even know about.
Yesterday, my eyeballs noticed that there was a huge amount of empty space between my site header and main content (which may or may not be there now—I need to ask my eyeballs). Once I knew about this, I could troubleshoot it, but prior to knowing, it functionally didn’t exist. My screen-reading technology didn’t pick it up, and I couldn’t see it.
“But, Mary, you found the post image.”
Funny, isn’t it. I can use modern technology to describe images, but I haven’t yet figured out a way to independently and accessibly look for weird formatting on my website. I did recently learn about Visual Regression Testing, which uses screenshots of a webpage to check for things that look buggy. If it can output the results in a way I can interact with, that would be very useful. But again, I didn’t know about this before, so functionally, it didn’t exist.
Well, I’m nowhere near coming to a finite conclusion, and I’m nearing my self-imposed upper limit for these posts. So instead of trying to throw together an ending that ties everything into a neat little bow, I’ll end with a few bullet points for thought.
- We don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s okay.
- Being open to learning is scary and exciting because, while you might get the answer you want, you might feel silly if it’s been there all along.
- Things that “functionally don’t exist” aren’t specific to vision loss. We all have gaps in our knowledge and abilities, which is, in my opinion, a strength of humanity because it encourages community (and story because I really wanted to get that in here too).
Well, thank you for coming to my philosophical exploration. Speaking of things I used to be into, I nearly took a philosophy minor in undergrad but wound up moving off in a different direction.
👋 Fair travels,
Mary