09/15/24

So today I stumbled across a tumblr post about cats, and why you should not let them outside. It was very informative, but the blog I originally found it on, had an interesting and infuriating characteristic I don’t think I’ve seen before.

I don’t know if it was purposeful, accidental, or whatever, and it doesn’t matter. You could not select text, at least, visibly. Now this might be for the purposes of trying to stop theft, plagiarism, etc, and I understand that, or maybe it’s an oversight. Thankfully it was not the original post, so I was able to easily find the actual OP and read it on their blog instead.

Now let me explain why this was a huge issue for me.

1.       The blog’s theme made text utterly tiny, and sure, I could zoom in, but:

2.       The text was also formatted in utterly enormous blocks of text, with one being 237 words with nothing but spaces, no indents, paragraphs, or line breaks.

Now, I get it, not everyone who posts text on the internet is a writer, and it was good information regardless, but that makes it impossible to parse for me and other people with ADHD. That’s fine! I know the world isn’t going to cater to me, and I have a workaround, coping mechanism, whatever you want to call it, for that.

It’s selecting text. Which was disabled by the theme for whatever reason.

I don’t know if this is a common way of dealing with it, but it helps me immensely to keep track of where I’m at when I’m looking at text. I will highlight a block of a few sentences or so, and then my eyes can more easily pick up where I was, and where I’m going with my reading.

You’ll notice I make very ample use of line breaks for this very reason, possibly too many.

Anyhow, I’m not sure what the point of writing this was, mostly as a vent, partially in the hopes that someone would see it and be more conscious of it in the future. If nothing else, maybe someone with ADHD and trouble with large blocks of text might see it and discover a new coping mechanism.

(On a fun side note, apparently Microsoft Word has an “Accessibility check” feature which I presume is more for checking for issues with screen readers and contrast, because that huge block of text passed it just fine.)