Browsing around for my favorite blog post for Fabruary, I just ran into Lou Plummer’s What Were Your First Seven Jobs? I say “browsing” but I was really just going through only his archive. I knew when I decided to participate in Robert Birming’s Fabruary that the post I would submit as my favorite would be something written by Lou.

The March edition of the IndieWeb Carnival is about accessibility on the small web. The host, orchids, touches on a note-worthy design pattern found in this fine corner of the Internet: that of artsy, personal websites that emulate technology of old, particularly the early days of Internet. The fair question orchids poses is: how does this design pattern affect people with particular accessibility needs?

Here I am.

I always say that I like returning from church with more questions than I brought in. The same is true for this month’s prompt.

The surfer, she tells me she met a woman at a 40s singles mixer. The type of woman who reschedules her flight home to Colorado so that they can have sushi in California. There’s a sweetness to tales of the dating world when I’m in a monogamous relationship. I feel only a little bad about appropriating them to satisfy something which I can’t put into words.

Imagine the world in which I hadn’t spotted the surfer in the queer Catholic Slack space of Vine & Fig when I did, that one day she was there. I have no right to define the surfer’s hardship. The day her parents kicked her out because she’s queer. The way she seeks to remain a parishioner in a space that can’t hold both her and the woman she loves.

More than any other time in my online life am I aware of the value of alt text. I make a point to write image descriptions whenever I can. Kind strangers with a variety of accessibility needs have been helping me understand how to best capture my interpretation of an image. I’ve come to regard alt text as the secret side bar I get to have with blind people and others who need it.

I am nostalgic about the way the Web used to be. I miss the handcrafted blogs that I used to visit, and the intimate windows they gave me into the lives of strangers.

I miss that I knew all the domain names by heart. It is a phantom pain of sorts; an unrest in the tip of my fingers reminding me I no longer need to make series of key combinations to find those personal public spaces, some more arts-and-craftsy than others, because most of them are gone. These days, I just circulate through a small number of news sites, like I did when I first got online as a young girl, not yet having found my way around the Internet.

The only journal I’ve ever been able to successfully keep is a photo journal. Not so much the one-book or one-website type, but more so a simply collection of visual anecdotes, encounters and experiences. My first website was called www.doyoulikemytightsweater.com. It was a HTML-based one-photo-per-page website that I updated very frequently. Ever since the domain expired and I got a little sick of getting pervy emails (I should have known), I had never owned a photo website that I loved so much.