[ad_1] Questo saggio è disponibile anche in italiano. ABOUT ME I am Elena, Italian, and I have been working in digital products’ accessibility since the early 2000s. I’ve been blind since birth and no matter how many obstacles brought by such condition, my solid network of friends and family allowed me to develop interests and curiosity from the very beginning, including a preference for detective stories, which I could practice in the first small “investigation” of my existence: HIV and AIDS. It was the end of 1980s and despite still being a child, I felt that AIDS-related advertisements on TV were projected more to scare than to give explanations about a disease, so continuing to ask uneasy questions to family members and teachers, by the time I was 13 I had already realized that dividing people into “right” and “wrong”, made no sense because the virus could affect anyone. So I made a promise in front of a poster of Freddie Mercury, and no matter if I couldn’t see it: I vowed that I would make any effort to allow other teens like me to avoid fear and get correct information. And so I did, because in high school I wrote some articles concerning HIV in the school journal, then continued to keep awareness of scientific advances, within my means, even after I finished my studies. My love for writing I always hated doing essays in school because they made me feel “scrutinized” and judged by my teachers; in fact, I always had very low grades in written expositions in which I was asked to talk about myself; it was different, however, if current events were discussed or, better yet, if I had to use my fantasy. In my teens I wrote a lot of stories and unfortunately I was unable to preserve the material, paper Braille does not last long and gets ruined, and so do floppy disks – early magnetic media for computers; then came CDs but transferring the material to those media did not allow me to edit files in them and I instead wanted my most important fictional character, the sentient HIV virus that speaks to humans, to grow with me so editing and rewriting were essential. The advent of blogging Late 1990s. Mail, chat, forums, and newsgroups were already allowing me to be a world’s active participant more than I had ever done before: no barriers in discussing topics from the funniest to the most difficult, including politics, even without necessarily talking about my visual disability. A dream was coming true! But how to open a personal space in which to expose myself without obeying rules written by others? I had learned how to build my first websites in HTML but maintaining all that code, and asking sighted people for help with graphics, had become an unsustainable commitment. Until I read about some platforms where people wrote a personal journal. From splinder to blogspot, then live journal, there were quite a few but none gave me full satisfaction because the web was beginning to suffer from what later came to be called sensory barriers, resulting in the nullification of the “universal web” utopia; they were more concerned with having a pretty, colorful interface rather than an easy-to-use platform. Welcome WordPress! It was the year 2004 and I had learned about a system that allowed me to create my own blog, in my website it was only necessary to buy space, it was even possible to choose the custom interface. It was called WordPress and an Italian community composed of volunteers with passions equal to mine was beginning to develop. It was my chance, I would be able to discuss with a proper community and really collaborate to raise awareness and overcome accessibility obstacles; I got in touch with Paolo Valenti known as Wolly, the first to bring WordPress in Italy. An extraordinary person who died in 2022 because of cancer. He always struggled for life and so he did for WordPress so if I am where I am now, it’s thanks to him. Over time he’s always urged me to persevere, never completely abandon WordPress despite the obstacles I might have encountered; and there were many barriers then, because since 2004 when I started my first site about songs and audio editing, my relationship with WordPress has been quite conflicted because of a visual editor that was creating difficulties rather than helping me. Not to mention themes, where you had to work on code any time you had to modify a small detail. I accepted the compromise of building a site with questionable graphics, and I went on like this for a few years: having exhausted my interest in blogging about audio, I had started one in which I shared my experiences with the game of chess, use and abuse of technology, book reviews, joys and sorrows of my personal life including the possibility of starting again with HIV and AIDS activism because in the meantime my former boyfriend, less comfortable with technology than me, had expressed a desire to blog about his experiences as a person living with HIV. Too bad about the editor which still, in the years 2009-2018, was complicated for me and I had to write articles by hand with HTML view instead of GUI view, and if I found it uncomfortable let alone him who had no knowledge of web languages. The blog concerning HIV was a failure, but together we had recorded a video talking about our experience on an Italian YouTube channel where they talk about sex education. Instead, on the personal blog I was posting more and more infrequently some articles about my technological frustrations, including the one due to pay TV services that do not pay enough attention to the needs of people with disabilities. From zero to the atom In 2019 all hell broke loose: relationship ended after 10 years, other unpleasant events happened to me one after another, I was brain drained; until
Continue readingDefeating silence and stigma with WordPress – Sconfiggere silenzio e stigma con WordPress
