post: thoughts about accessibility needs
i'm midway through fixing my retheme here so i can embed it on mobile neocities as we speak, so it's bringing up a lot of thoughts and feelings that i've had rolling around since i first abjectly failed at using the @media transform property. i have this almost pathological need to pre-emptively defend myself against the idea that anyone could struggle with my site as it is, which is stupid. i'm well aware that my coding work is amateur and janky the same way i'm aware that my own colour palette needs are not the typical kind.
anyone who follows my tumblr will have watched me spend the last few months attempting and failing on every front to make a mobile view that i could stand to look at. i know that this isn't the assignment, but at a certain point everything you add to your own formatting takes away from the platonic ideal of a 18pt comic sans muted white x muted black text only paradise. and the people who need that are already in the habit of hitting the browser text-only extensions that i use to bypass paywalls before the screen freezes.
pictured: several really earnest attempts that did nothing more than piss me off.
in the end i've had to really sit down and admit to myself that nothing i've been doing has been workable. i've tried everything. i don't even have a screenshot of the month that i spent with my blog in text-only on neocities but there's a reason it almost knocked me out of the game entirely. i'd tried everything short of just manually copying all of the content out and then pasting it back in to some display:none element i had toggled to only show if you were on a phone-sized screen. and then i tried that! it was miserable. just genuinely miserable. it was humiliatingly hard to force myself to do, really easy to completely lobotomize myself midway through and then end up with a page that just recursively ended because i hadn't caught that my ctrl+a hadn't caught everything in the window and had pasted it in and gone to bed, and just overall ugly to look at.
every time i tried to put an element in i'd turn to my husband and ask her (bigender uwu, but more relevantly to this piece: super short sighted without her glasses on) what it looked like on superzoom and immediately eat shit. the black-rimmed screenshot up there is her view of the exact same one preceding it, except that one was taken on my phone instead. that's right: i'd even tried to add a second @media transform for an even smaller (344px iirc) screen to try and make that work instead. fuck knows why, but i've never dug myself into a hole i didn't believe i could get out of by tunneling to the sea and then swimming up.
anyway. that obviously didn't work. in fact, i started putting off typing up stuff i had basically all of the raw materials for because i didn't want to wrestle css for two hours and then have to do it all again from scratch just so that it could hypothetically render in a format i didn't like on the iphone of a stranger. the same way you should make sure people want to own your art at all before you open up commissions, i was marketing what was essentially an empty frontpage to an audience that didn't exist.
so how is doing it for bearblog any different? easy: i can type the entries up here first and save them as totally private drafts and fiddle with them to my heart's content and then go back into the crocodile pit (the tumblr theme editor for @rshp that i code everything directly into because i am, again, a deeply insane person) safe in the knowledge that even if i screw it up sixteen times i've already done everything besides decorate the fucking cake. i know that i was onto something with giving up on mobile view of the actual rosehip website and i've always been fond of bearblog. giving her more power in their dynamic also lets me put my focus on filling my site with things i enjoy talking about, which makes my neocities stronger as well. of course i still play around with blockquotes and pixels on bearblog, but the actual text content is immediately rippable whenever i want to highlight and ctrl+c it.
at the end of the day there are two disabled people i know who read my site, and it's me and my baby. my baby can read my bearblog and i'm inching ever closer to figuring out how to toggle a night mode on for her, so that's one worry off my plate. as for me? i've stopped burning the candle at both ends trying to achieve something wildly out of my comfort zone, found a system i can actually maintain, and have energy to waste on the 400 other abandoned projects that haunt me constantly. wouldn't that be nice?