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If you support disabled people, please stand with us against Discord’s redesign.

...and do more than reblog this post about it.

Chronic migraines. Dyslexia. ADHD. Autism. Vision impairment. Visual sensory processing disorder. Colorblind. & Neurotypical. Abled.

These are aspects of people that are affected by Discord’s new update to its color scheme and font, and there very well could be more I didn’t mention. Yes, you read it right, abled people and neurotypical people too. You are not immune to eyestrain.

What are the issues?

A font which is both overly uniform and overly squished, with many letters that have essentially the same silhouette as others and could easily be flipped and look the same as another. ▻ This is dyslexic-unfriendly, as well as generally harder to read and an issue for people with visual impairments who may find that letters bleed together or that their eyes ‘skip’ over letters or words at times.

A color scheme that is so highly saturated that it both immediately draws your attention and also makes you want to immediately look away. ▻ This is generally unfriendly, affecting people with sensory issues the most (ADHD/Autism, migraines, processing disorders), but it’s also colorblind-unfriendly. Due to the differences between the colors being exclusively the part that changes the named color (hue; “green” vs “blue”) instead of both that and the colors being different intensities (saturation; “neon green” vs “leaf green”), they look practically identical.

Aren’t there more? No. This is pretty much all that was changed.

Discord changed TWO THINGS and pretty much managed to land every single person possible to genuinely hurt with a visual design change that doesn’t add or remove any elements. Including abled and neurotypical people!!!

Discord is currently a good number of people’s lifeline and way to connect with others. And with this change, they just made using their app hurt. They know that we can’t leave their app without leaving our friends and communities behind. They know that if they can just sweep this under the rug, they won’t have to do a thing.

...So we can’t let them.

Why would Discord do this?

It’s actually fairly simple. Discord was hemorrhaging money from its very conception. Discord only exists because investors think it’ll make money in the future. If Discord doesn’t do as well, investors will push to make it “better” or they’ll drop their funding. Discord was probably forced into this situation, they probably knew exactly what would happen.

We have to show their investors that Discord was right.

What can we do to fix this?

DON’T:

Reply to Discord’s tweet about the design change. ▻ It gives Discord more attention, and if any complaints are acknowledged they are directed to Discord’s accessibility forums.

ONLY post on Discord’s accessibility forums. ▻ It gives Discord stats to work with, but it also means the outcry isn’t public. We need everyone to see this, not just Discord.

DO:

Reblog this post. ▻ Spreads the awareness, and all.

Retweet, reply to, and/or like this tweet: https://twitter.com/KarklesMarx/status/1393223369571586053 ▻ This tweet is part of our and our friends’ initiative to get this big and get this public.

Make your own posts about it on different social medias. ▻ Tumblr, Twitter, Discord servers, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever ground you have, use it. You can help make this change too.

Find other people doing the same thing. ▻ One initiative is never enough. Look for other people making posts like these and boost their posts too.

IF YOU KNOW ANOTHER LANGUAGE, MAKE POSTS OF YOUR OWN BOOSTING IT IN OTHER LANGUAGES. ▻ Please. There are probably a lot of people we haven’t reached because this is an all-English post.

Wait, don’t you have pictures of what’s going on?

We do. They’re under the cut, to prevent causing issues for people reading the post.

This compilation post of the smaller problems: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/1500001066342-Fix-Your-Stuff-or-ALLOW-CUSTOM-CLIENTS-or-BOTH-

Images that show some of the changes:

[Two screenshots of the Discord icon on an IOS device. One is a cool indigo gradient, the other is a solid, brightly saturated indigo.]

[The words “gaming central” twice in Discord’s new font. One is bold, the other is not.]

[The words “reddit fart reddit smell” in Discord’s new font. Underneath, the highly saturated indigo as seen in the icons, stretching across the screen to indicate new messages.]

[Discord’s old indigo, icon, and stylized font displayed above Discord’s new indigo, icon, and stylized font.]

dam…….. that website “you feel like shit” (it’s like a questionnaire / troubleshooting guide for when you feel like shit) really works………………….. im not even all the way thru it and i even half-assed a lot of the suggestions and i already feel loads better

If you haven’t ditched the Amazon-owned Goodreads in favor of the independent, Black-owned StoryGraph, what are you waiting for?

You can import your Goodreads data (so you won’t lose years of book tracking)!

You can get personal recommendations based on your current preferences!

It’s sleek af!

IT’S NOT OWNED BY AMAZON

Users can apply content warnings so you can avoid triggers before ever opening a specific book

The same applies for ‘mood’! Wanna read something sad? Find books tagged as ‘sad’, that’s literally it

IT’S NOT OWNED BY JEFF BEZOS

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad.