AO3: accessibility and the needs of the many. or me.
so, everyone who's read my whining knows my eyes are bad, my right eye much worse than my left. this is not news.
or maybe I flocked those posts, in which case I'm outing myself now, but there you go. that's not the point, just background data, because with the new deploy of AO3, some changes have been made to the structure of the stylesheets that make it possible for people with accessibility needs to more easily customize the skins so they can read the porn.
this is also not the point. for me. because I am a lame-ass who's only gotten so far as to make a javascript button in my toolbar that I've been clicking, over and over, to customize the font and background color of every single damned story I want to read.
"holy shit that's pathetic!" you might say. "get your techno shit together or something!"
well, see, I didn't have to, because Lim did it for me. Lim made a skin for this most recent deploy that is just perfect, that makes reading easy for me, because she worries about these things, because she was thinking about the needs of everyone, because she tried so damned hard to think about platforms and devices and all the different users, and still integrated design and elegance and made a zillion different skins for people to play with and build upon, and in addition, offered a skin that would spoof the old AO3 look-and-feel on top of the new just in case people missed it. and then she helped with the doc on how people could easily add skins of their own. she did all that in between not sleeping and dealing with her own life, and as a volunteer, out of love of fandom. and for all this, hours and hours of heartfelt labor and finicky devotion and freaking love, she just got a shitstorm of guff and hysteria and criticism.
so right now, I just sort of hate fandom a lot, because right now I don't have to click a button every single time I want to read a story. because of Lim, right now I see gorgeous, easy-to-read text with the right-contrasty-background, every time I load a story. because of Lim.
because Lim was thinking of me.
or maybe I flocked those posts, in which case I'm outing myself now, but there you go. that's not the point, just background data, because with the new deploy of AO3, some changes have been made to the structure of the stylesheets that make it possible for people with accessibility needs to more easily customize the skins so they can read the porn.
this is also not the point. for me. because I am a lame-ass who's only gotten so far as to make a javascript button in my toolbar that I've been clicking, over and over, to customize the font and background color of every single damned story I want to read.
"holy shit that's pathetic!" you might say. "get your techno shit together or something!"
well, see, I didn't have to, because Lim did it for me. Lim made a skin for this most recent deploy that is just perfect, that makes reading easy for me, because she worries about these things, because she was thinking about the needs of everyone, because she tried so damned hard to think about platforms and devices and all the different users, and still integrated design and elegance and made a zillion different skins for people to play with and build upon, and in addition, offered a skin that would spoof the old AO3 look-and-feel on top of the new just in case people missed it. and then she helped with the doc on how people could easily add skins of their own. she did all that in between not sleeping and dealing with her own life, and as a volunteer, out of love of fandom. and for all this, hours and hours of heartfelt labor and finicky devotion and freaking love, she just got a shitstorm of guff and hysteria and criticism.
so right now, I just sort of hate fandom a lot, because right now I don't have to click a button every single time I want to read a story. because of Lim, right now I see gorgeous, easy-to-read text with the right-contrasty-background, every time I load a story. because of Lim.
because Lim was thinking of me.