A long time ago on television I saw this programme about artists. Well I’ve seen lots of programmes about artists really, being as I used to think I was one, and every now and then I occasionally still think it. But there was this one in particular:

A man collected over 1000 autumn leaves and he wrote on them. Happy little statements, nice little messages. He put all 1000 into a sack, and went to the roof of a tall building, and then emptied the sack of leaves into the wind so the messages would get carried far and wide and would perhaps make someones day.

I thought abut it again recently, when reading somewhere (I think it was at Graces) that you always see the streets in some city littered with sexxxy ‘empowermentful’ porn posters and fliers. I got this mental imagery of fliers all about town with sexist depictions of women all over them, just papering the streets. N’I thought… ‘I want to paper the streets with opposite fliers. Things that promote women and are anti porn and anti empowermentfulism. Maybe with some ‘love your body’ stuff thrown in as well.
I thought about how maybe women reading those fliers would see them, and maybe it would brighten their day, and then I remembered roof-leaf-man. N’I thought about how leaves and such are absolutely better because they don’t harm the environment in the same way (Though it’d be harder to notice a message written on a leaf I guess.)
I think I want to do that, or something like that.

N’maybe make little fliers that I can stick on noticeboards and things. Like, outside shopping places etc.

I don’t know. It might brighten some womans day, and I think the effort is worth that.

Does this sound good to anyone else? If it does sound good, and anyone else would want to be involved, then wouldn’t it be awesome if we made a real day of it? Like a bunch of women-folk and pro-women-folk collecting leaves and writing on them for a few months, and then releasing them into the wild on the same day.
It sounds fantastic.

Would anyone else want to be involved in a project like that?

Webpage Accessibility.

Hey there. I was thinking about how I needed to make the image in my last entry accessible. When I say accessible I mean accessible to disabled people, like making it so that screen readers (programs designed to read webpages out loud) can help people with visual impairments to view websites.
Also I’ve been thinking about accessibility because its a subject that comes up at university pretty often. I’m doing multimedia which means I’ve taken a few website design and programming courses.
I’m doing some pretty intense web programming this semester actually.
I’ve got an assignment at the moment where making the website accessible gives us a sizable portion of our grade.

Accessibility is good. If people don’t pay attention to accessibility it makes things a whole lot harder for people with disabilities to get around on the internet.
There are all kinds of things that can make websites inaccessible. Like, using a flash menu where you have to click the mouse and can’t use the keyboard. That could make things difficult for people with mobility issues.
Using low contrasting colours can make things a pain etc.
Y’know, disabled people have as much right to the online world as we do but if people making web content aren’t paying attention to this shit then they’re just not able to access the information out there.
It’s not like able bodied people are out to exclude disabled people.* Mostly its just an extension of privilege. We don’t think about the needs of disabled people because we don’t experience having those needs. We don’t see what they need unless we’re paying attention.

Here’s some sites listing accessibility guidelines:

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
These guidelines were created by the W3C folk. I can’t remember at all what W3C stands for, but these people are important on the internet. They set HTML standards and shit.
Their guidelines are very strict and fufilling all of it could be difficult/time consuming if you are a web developer, which most people aren’t. This isn’t the latest version of their guidelines I don’t think.

508 Standards, Section 1194.22
These are some guidelines for the level of accessibility required on gonvernment sites. I assume these standards apply in America but their information is good.
These standards are a bit more relaxed. There are good descriptions for every requirement. I can’t really say what it’d be like to read for people who aren’t all up ins on web development being as I’m into this web development stuff quite a bit, but I find this document very easy to read and understand.

Now I know that most folk aren’t web developers, but there’s something simple everyone should be able to do - and thats providing text alternatives to things that aren’t text, like images and video.
One of the simplest things people can do is use alt tags on their images. For example the HTML for an image without an alt tag might look something like this:
<img src=”image.jpg”>
To make this accessibile you can just throw in an alt tag. (Alternative text tag) to add a description to the image. Doing that would look like this:
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”This is a description of the image - well really its an explanation of an alt tag but you get the point”>

If you’re on wordpress I don’t think they actually show images if there’s no alt tag at all. When you click the image button to put an image in it comes up with a text box asking you to fill in a description. The description is what goes in the alt tag. If the image is used for more then decoration, and is used to illustrate some sort of point or convey any information then it’s important to fill those tags in and give the descriptions.
It’s terribly simple and does so much for accessibility.

I came across some pages to help test the accessibility of a website.
juicystudio
cynthiasays

I ran every website in my blogroll through the last one (cynthia says) testing for the section 508 requirements.
3 out of the 15 pages linked on my blogroll failed the first section, the one about providing text alternatives to non text elements. (Most but not all of the other sections were passed by all of the blogs on my list, likely because of the way wordpress sets things up.)
Some of that failure might be the part of wordpress. I didn’t really look into which templates had what etc, because this was meant to be all very quick.

At any rate - adding alt tags is easy. I also tend to provide transcripts of video that I upload, though that is more time consuming. These are simple things most of us can do. I mostly thought I’d make a post about this because I only found out about this accessibility stuff after going to uni and doing web development courses. There are things every day users, like bloggers can do and p’raps not everybody knows about them.

Hopefully more people might be aware of accessibility issues now, or might know where to do to get the guides and whatnot. I hope to have helped somehow…

*Though they’re often not out to help them. When accessibility gets brought up in class lecturers usually coach it in terms of “You might not want to put in the effort for disabled people or care about social justice issues but it’s illegal if you don’t design your sites so they’re accessible.
My brother is going into web development and I told him about accessibility. He got angry and said that it made him want to go out and kick a disabled person in the head for making him have to do extra work. >.<
I’ve seen a bunch of pages trying to coax web developers into following accessibility guidelines by saying “It doesn’t just help disabled people, it also helps your search engine optimization or it makes websites accessible on portable devices” because you know. The minority of people accessing your website on portable devices are more important then disabled people.
Or something. >.<

This image shows a girl wearing the lolita style of fashion. She’s wearing pink and white with ruffles, bows and petticoats. Her pink skirt has the writing ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ on it; with white symbols representing women. Her white socks have the same symbols in pink.
Beside her there is a quote by Betty Friedan saying “And we had considered ourselves the vanguard of the working class revolution, feeling only contempt for dreary bourgeois capatalists like our fathers - though we still read Vogue under the hair dryer and spent all our money on clothes.”

I’m on a bit of a creative bender. Been doing a lot of programming at university. Hard cold logical stuff. I come home and I find I just want to make things.
This piece here is me critisizing myself for not really acting out on my thoughts that femininity is harmful. Like the last post I made was in no way deep. I really do like lace, hearts and ruffles and I really do hate femininity and it causes me to have these weird conflicting feelings.
I don’t know how other people will read this and I’d be happy for people to take their own meanings out of it, but I want to clarify that whilst I’m taking a jab at myself for claiming a radical label whilst surrounding myself in gendered things, I don’t mean to take a jab at any other woman for her choices.
I’m just exploring what I think of my own choices.

The girl in the picture is a representation of me.

Here’s the real me, for reference:

Fuck Femininity

In which I tell Richie a story, and then decide to share:

Cellycel says:
I had an ex who told me he was moving to South Australia and never coming back. So we broke up. I started dating the dude I’m dating now.
When he came back in a years time, he kept trying to get us back together.
Richie says:
gah
Cellycel says:
Like he’d get high at parties and be like “Celly can we have one last kiss?” and I’d be like “No. Stop that.”
Then, and here’s the brilliant part. He, my new boyfriend, myself and a bunch of other people we knew MOVED INTO A HOUSE TOGETHER.
Good move, good move.
Richie says:
oh dear
Cellycel says:
It ended with him getting really really mad at my current boyfriend over various (probably legitimate) things. My boyfriend is, as they say an asshole.
He’s is one of those assholes who you _just can’t hurt or visibly make feel bad_ so my ex decided he’d throw all of that anger onto me. Seeing as how he’d dated me in the past and knew what really upset me and all.
I didn’t know he was doing it for the longest time ’till a few months after we all moved out I saw him again and asked about it. He explained that whole “Couldn’t hurt your boyfriend, so had to hurt you” thing to me.
So taken a back a bit I was like… “Ummm…. So would you ever do it again?” and he said “Yes. Yes I would”
So I’ve not talked to him except for the times he’s tried to contact me on my birthdays for the last two years.
The first year he sent a message saying “I didn’t get you a physical present, but I offer you the rekindling of our friendship”
Richie says:
*barf*
Cellycel says:
So I sent back something like “If you didn’t get me anything that’s cool. But don’t go doing something for yourself and then saying it’s a gift to me. That’s like saying ‘I bought myself a roller coaster for your birthday, but you can ride it too.’ that shit doesn’t fly.”
And then he didn’t contact me until my _next_ birthday where he got on msn and said “hey” and we had a conversation never mentioning any of that business.
Richie says:
:/
Cellycel says:
This guy was the porn editor - for reference.
Richie says:
Right
Cellycel says:
he also claimed to be highly submissive. Once when I was mad at him I pointed out that for someone who was so ’submissive to women’ he didn’t seem to actually respect anything real women had to say, and asked why he had so much porn of girls gagged and bound anyway, if _he_ got off on being submissive and liked others to be dominant.
He basically told me I’d caught him out, and he knew the whole thing was a farce, but no-one else picked up on it.
(Seriously, he’d have house mates cuff him to his bed so he could feel “comfortable” knowing it creeped half the people in the house out, but really he’s just submissive and doesn’t care for playing with power himself.)
Richie says:
That’s bizarre
Cellycel says:
What he was _actually_ enjoying there was creeping out one of the housemates in particular. IRL trolling basically.
Richie says:
Bah
Cellycel says:
Another interesting dynamic in that house:
The person who got so freaked out by Mr “Please tie me to my bed while I meditate” was the guy who yelled at his girlfriend a lot and was constantly making her cry and then leaving the room while she was still crying acting like nothing ever happened.
Mr “Yelling at my girlfriend is totally cool and normal” was really creeped out by Mr “Please tie me to my bed while I meditate”
Which struck me as right odd since Mr “yelling at my girlfriend is cool and normal” had lots of his own porn about women being bound and gagged.
Richie says:
That sounds terrible
Cellycel says:
Yeah. I didn’t realize quite how fucked it all was when I was there.
I mean, I picked up on about half of it, and it was a lot more _emotional_ at the time - but I didn’t really _get_ the extent of it.

I just want everyone to feel warm and safe and happy, and loved, and comfortable and accepted and valid and worthwhile and free and respected and valued.
So much of what I think and feel is based on just not wanting other people to feel bad, and to be in bad positions.
One guy said that this was patriarchal of me because it was very motherly and a woman doing motherly things is supporting gender roles or some crap. I think I told him to eff off, which is funny and silly because I think it was a justified response but also I want him to feel happy, valid etc.

I don’t know. This is a useless post, and I feel useless saying “I just want everyone to be in a good situation. Wouldn’t it be jolly nice if all inequalities and whatnot went away and everyone could be free. Now lets go have some cherry”
But Jesus. It’d be nice wouldn’t it.

This dude, this dude was talking to me about how he doesn’t think much of feminism, and I was like “Well I do.” (But of course, he already knew that.)
I’d basically say that inequality makes things hard for people (Which can be a severe understatement.) and privilege gives other people an easy step up, and its not fair. I just want everything to be fair and good, and for people to feel good.
N’he was like “It’s not about fair.”
Why can’t it be about fair.

Whats so silly about wanting things to be good?

Perhaps ’cause it seems like there’s nothing I can do to help. Oh. Biting Beaver wrote something a long time ago. that she would die in the same world she was born. That she’d never see any changes, and that it upset her deeply and the day she wrote it I was like “Yes. I understand.”
N I put it as my MSN quote and got asked about it by a “friend” (Read: Jerk who later came to harass my sister.) - and told him the story and got asked why I even want to try and change things anyway. Why not just live life and igore all that bad shit.
But… I just… want everyone to feel good, and loved, and valued and safe and warm and accepted. What kind of person would I be if I didn’t want those things, and try for those things even when it seems bleak?

Inequalities n’shit. That they’re not going away, oh god how long will it be ’till… ’till just one thing is gone. Sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, ageism etc.
How long will it take to eradicate one of those oppressions let alone all of them? Fuck, this spell checker doesn’t even recognize ableism as a _word._

Yeah. I’m a pessimist. I don’t much know what to do about it but pretend some days like I’m not a pessimist and keep trying.

I didn’t mean this post to end like this. I just wanted to tell everyone I wish them well but I kept going. I’ve been feeling really bad over the past few days for unknown reasons. I was sobbing in the middle of the street today, and sobbing at home, and lonely yesterday even though I wasn’t even alone in the house, just not in the same room as my house mate while my boyfriend was out.
I should follow that “seeing a therapist” thing up. It’s probably be good for me.

I do genuinely wish everyone well.

*sobbing again*

I think I’ll go to bed.