About accessibility:
First, if you have any concerns, comments, or requests regarding accessibility, please email me directly at doorbell@yone.house, and I will prioritize addressing them.
I recently updated most JavaScript on this site in an attempt to be compatible with ARIA, screenreaders, and keyboard navigability. From what I can tell it works pretty well, but there are certainly problems I missed—please let me know if you encounter anything troublesome. The most exciting thing to me is adding a text description option in my feelings form & archive.
My digital accessibility experience is primarily in ebook publishing, not in web design. Even though .epub files are build with HTML and CSS, and I know a decent amount about web accessibility modification, I have never built a website from the ground up before (especially not one that contains JavaScript). So, I am always learning new things as I go, and accessibility is certainly not perfect on this website; however, I am trying my best, not being afraid to experiment, using as many tools as possible, and trying to consider as many bodies and abilities as I can to guide me in this coding discovery process. Learning how to build this website and all the playing, imagining, and problem solving involved has been an invaluable resource for learning & thinking more about disability justice.
This colophon page was originally imagined in part for accessibility purposes, especially the color description section.
Alt text is important and essential, and the Alt Text as Poetry and Alt Text Selfies projects provide a great framework for writing it, so please check them out. Informed by these projects and my own desires, on this site I like to use alt text as a way to add more personal, confessional, or non-visually evident context to images that is only available to a select audience of people who use or care about alt text (only done with non-functional images).
I'm revealing this here so that people with fewer digital access needs might try interacting with this website in ways that may be new to them. Alt text can be read visually using browser extensions, browser developer tools, or by looking at the source code; navigating a website without using a mouse always reveals interesting things (and, more frequently, frustrating things). There are uncountably many ways to interact with a website, and sometimes the methods the web is built to prioritize can be boring.
I am trying my best to crip this site, meaning I am trying my best to intentionally invert abledness on this site. In my dreams, this will encourage people to crip their websites too. And then, to crip the world 🌏.
- Generics of keyboard navigation
- Free screen reader
- Chrome alt text viewer extension
- Firefox alt text viewer extension
- Stacked draggable images must be separated before turning on alt text viewing extensions for readability.
Side note regarding publishing accessibility: check out the new epub version of Alt Text as Poetry's workbook, converted by me!
Cripping the World, an Email to My Students, 2020
By Joseph Grigley
Class,
I've heard from a few of you about how challenging it is getting back into your studio work and your research, and I am seeing this play out at my own home in different ways: I'm tying a lot of trout flies, my partner (after being sick and quarantined) is baking a lot, and my daughter is playing Switch-stuff with her friends via phone. In a way, though, we're all working, even if it's not what we "should" be working on.
My personal opinion about what's happening now—which is based on fifty-three years of intimate experience with the subject as a disabled person—is this: The world's been cripped. In disability theory we use this phrase to describe inversals of abledness. The habits of biological normalcy of the global body have been thrown into disarray, in a way similar to what happens when individual bodies become disabled. All it takes is a blink, and in a moment, nothing is as it was.
If you read carefully between the lines of public discourse, you will find many people with disabilities are saying: Now the world will feel what we feel. Now the world will experience life as we experience it. This involves an inability to move freely or access information with ease; isolation; frustration with institutional procedures and practices; and a very special kind of anger that one's plans have been disrupted. You feel robbed of fairness and justice.
So the frustration and anger that some are feeling, and that is coming out into the open in different ways, is not unexpected. We can't change what is happening around us, as far as the pandemic itself is concerned. We can only change how we relate to it, and how we assimilate the circumstances, and realign ourselves in relation to those circumstances.
The online/distance learning component of our class is, practically speaking, merely a way of keeping in touch: It doesn't replace being in a room together, or in a studio together, and it's not meant to. Enabling technologies do not displace, supplant, or replace the original functions of human engagement; they simply supplement those functions (what pedagogical authorities euphemistically call "enrichment learning"). The goal (for me) of distance learning is to habilitate (as opposed to rehabilitate) ourselves to these new circumstances. People with disabilities do this every day, negotiating, like electricity, a path of least resistance.
The first step in managing things is to be kind to yourself. It's OK to put aside all your big goals and plans if you feel you need to. You can come back to them later. Or maybe they'll change—this all takes time. What's important is to find things to do from which you derive some satisfaction—and these things will vary for each of us. Day after day after day, the ennui can be frustrating; but then I think of On Kawara, painting one date painting after another. The thing is not to worry about the expectations of others; not to worry about what the world thinks. Do what feels right for you, on your own terms.
It feels a little strange and proselytizing saying all this stuff—so take it for whatever it's worth, or not. But I feel I have to say something. In the world of disability, the notion of "overcoming" is a problematic construction: It assumes that one must overcome circumstances to move on. But it's not overcoming that matters: It's intercoming, working with the situation, reshaping and realigning yourself as you go. Be creative doing it. Be persistent. Listen to yourself, and what your mind and body tell you. And—dare I say it?—try to have fun too.
Those are my thoughts anyhow. They may not parallel what you are hearing from others, or even what you are hearing from your own inner recesses; but I want to give you the space to reorient your ways of working, if not your work itself. As Edgar says at the end of King Lear, when acknowledging the tragedy that has unfolded: "The weight of this sad time we must obey / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
See you all next week in our Zoom Room.
Joseph
As published in Otherhow: Essays and Documents on Art and Disability, 1985–2024 by Joseph Grigley. Primary Information, 2026.About code:
The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in this website was coded by hand from blank documents, with the help of Mozilla Developer and w3schools reference pages, many many Stack Overflow posts, a few JavaScript libraries, and, to be completely honest, some local AI to make more difficult or unique JavaScript functions be more accessible. This site is hosted on Neocities, and my domain and email are handled by Porkbun. Every document was written and compiled on the Neocities website, which does not have a very user-friendly interface because absolutely nothing is automatic. There are probably better ways to make these files, but I don't know what they are, and to be honest I really like having to write every character by hand. I use the "Dreamweaver" visual theme, for reasons I don't remember at all but I think I just liked it.
Because of this situation, the code of this website is my largest writing project to date, despite the site's modest appearance. Typing and structuring this code, tags, attributes, and all, really does feel like a creative writing exercise. There are more pages in the works, and I'm excited to share them when they're done. I'm really proud of this website!
The code of this website is entirely spaghetti code, because I learned as I went. It's making it harder to expand now, and every time I look at old code I am horrified, but maybe one day I will go back and sort it out. Please do not look at my global stylesheet, or any source files. They are horrendous. But I am getting better every time I add to this!
About data:
I use Simple Analytics for data tracking of this site, which from what I can tell does not collect your unique identifier or provide your data to advertisers. I was using Google Analytics for that in the past which is really gross and I apologize for selling out your data that way. I just learned it does that, which is unsurprising in hindsight. If anyone has any better analytics recommendations please let me know—I only really use it in curiosity for seeing where my website goes.
Importantly, your feeling color data is not tracked. Someone asked me about this the other day, so to be clear: all the form collects is color hex code, description string, and timestamp, and stores it as plain text. I don't use web analytics on that page either.
About people:
Many people have provided the inspiration and education that built this website. I originally wanted to list them, but it felt like presenting an acceptance speech with nothing to accept, so right now I will omit the list. However, there are two people who are directly responsible for some pages on this website: Kameelah Janan Rasheed inspired this colophon page, and Elliot of special.fish inspired the lists page. Maybe one day I will have a Thank You page as robust as thefolkaholic.com/thankya.
This site more generally grew from people I've met at institutions I've had the privilege of learning at, notably School for Poetic Computation, Fleisher Art Memorial, the city of Philadelphia in general, and a select number of people at Swarthmore College.
If you are reading this website you probably inspired me creatively in some way, and I hope I've made that clear to you. So many loved ones, friends, collaborators, and mentors have added to this website in a huge way. Thank you!
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Interview by Tim Rollins, April and June 1993 [excerpt]
TR: Getting back to how you make decisions. I wanted to ask you how you chose the blue that you use. What's the difference between your blue, Felix Gonzalez-Torres blue, and Yves Klein blue?
FGT: First of all, my blue is not an international blue, as Yves Klein's was. Mine is just a light blue that you can get anywhere, in any hardware store.
TR: It's more specific. It's not just light blue.
FGT: Actually, I change it all the time. It's a light blue that I change all the time.
TR: It's close to the blue [the Italian architect] Aldo Rossi uses, that's why I know.
FGT: Really? It just has to be light blue.
TR: Okay. Why is it light blue? Is this a baby blue for boys? A robin's egg blue?
FGT: It's more like a Giotto blue in the Caribbean -- saturated with bright sunlight.
TR: It's lighter than Giotto's blue.
FGT: But when you go out in the Caribbean sun the colors get very washed out. It's almost like what Giotto's blue would look like in Last Year in Marienbad -- a memory of a light blue. For me if a beautiful memory could have a color that color would be light blue. There's a lot of positive dialectic, you know, in blues.
blue (bl50) n. 1. a. Any of a group of colors whose hue is that of a sky on a clear day. b. Anything of this color. 2. the blue. a. The sky.-adj. blu-er, blu-est. 1. Of the color blue. 2. Having a gray or purplish color, as from cold or bruise. 3. Informal. Gloomy; depressed. 4. Puritanical; strict. 5. Indecent; risqué: a blue joke. -- blued, bluing. 1. To make blue. 2. To use bluing on. -- idioms. once in a blue moon. Rarely. out of the blue. At a completely unexpected time.
(The American Heritage Dictionary, 2d college ed.)
TR: It's very baby blue, you know, the blue of your first flannel blanket (if you're a boy). You don't use a royal, rich, velvety blue, you use this innocent blue.
FGT: That's a good word for it -- an innocent blue.
TR: Is it a gay blue?
FGT: No. You know, I really didn't have much of an investment in light blue as a kid because we didn't have that kind of luxury of choice. You just got whatever you got: either blue or pink or whatever. If you got a blanket at all you were lucky -- forget about what color it is.
TR: You paint whole walls with it
FGT: Yeah.
TR: So it's a big deal.
FGT: I love blue skies. I love blue oceans. Ross and I would spend summers next to a blue body of water or under clear, Canadian blue skies.
About color:
The primary color scheme of this website is adapted from combination 341 in A Dictionary of Color Combinations, Vol. 1 [配色事典 大正・昭和の色彩ノート] by Wada Sanzo, generously gifted to me by my dear friend Ada. I am aware that the way I am using this scheme is not the most visually appealing. I am actively working on it right now and so this color description might lag behind a little bit.
I chose combination 341 because it feels like a digitally saturated field, with the sky and grass and ground, and sometimes the sunrise or sunset. And I was thinking a lot about fields at the time.
I adapted all colors from the CMYK values given in the book before I found out about this online version of the book by Dain Kim. However, the exact CMYK values on a screen did not match what is in the printed book, at least not in the light underneath the Noguchi Ben Franklin Monument on a bright-gray day (the literal values were all a bit more saturated on the screen, and maybe a little greener?). So, I adapted these colors as best I could to match. With a little fiddling.
All chosen colors in the code of this website are in HSL format [hue, saturation, lightness]. I like this format because I can encode meaning into the color property numbers in a qualitative way, as opposed to RGB format adding separate primary colors that have their own meaning already, or hex codes which are just opaque chaos to me. I also like the roundness of the color system, as opposed to a cube. These numbers are where the fiddling takes place: all hue angles stand alone with the color being their only meaning, but their saturation and lightness values are all slightly modified into significant numbers to me, while retaining the character of the color.
I have thought about this a lot. Here is a descriptive list of the main colors on this website:
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Light Glaucous Blue
hsl(206, 61%, 88%)
This was the base color I found the color combination from, and it is the background color of the entire website. I wanted a light blue, and I read somewhere that if a beautiful memory could have a color that color would be light blue, and so I chose this one because I liked the word "glaucous," which describes both a "dull grayish-green or blue color" and "covered with a powdery bloom like that on grapes." That is exactly what the color is: a dull grayish-blue, like the bitter starchy texture of touching a fruit fresh off its tree. I like that it is the luminous, powdery color you see through that indicates a fruit has barely been touched. I like the feeling it leaves in your mouth: the astringent sensation of your boots pressing into crunchy snow but on your tongue and teeth and cheeks.
Just changed the nav and the blocks on this page to be shaped like a bush or treetop. Inspired by this Virginia Woolf quote:
Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence. Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. Louis is a story. ... Let him burble on with his story while I lie back and regard the stiff-legged figures of the padded batsmen through the trembling grasses. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving—on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up, through the trees, into the sky. The match seems to be played up there. Faintly among the soft, white clouds I hear the cry "Run", I hear the cry "How's that?" The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever— —The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 1931
I hope you enjoy looking at the sky through the trees while I burble on with my stories. If this blue could stay forever...
Saturation: 61 is the age of my Obaba when I was born.
Lightness: 88 is the age of my Obaba as I write this—a very lucky age.
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Cossack Green
hsl(110, 97%,19%)
The color of the links on this page: a green like that kind of grass that is dark and long and particularly lush and always kind of wet feeling. ...I intend to do research about the "Cossack" aspect of this green, but in the meantime here is the Wikipedia page for the Cossack ethnic group. Lmk if you find any clues about green!
It is the color of the sections on my about page, and of the bush my nav links are peeking through. On other pages it is occasionally used for borders and underlines, as an accent color.
Saturation: 97 is my birth year and the largest prime under 100.
Lightness: ~19 is the age I was when my disabilities started to present themselves.
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Deep Slate Olive
hsl(108, 37%, 08%)
The color of this text—it appears as black, but is a dark dark dark green. You are looking up at a tree in a deep deep forest. It is used as a replacement for black in things like the outline of the lists on my lists page, and the text in the nav.
Saturation: 37 is the age I thought my mother was for ~6 years of early childhood.
Lightness: 08 is a significant year to me because it was the final year of US commemorative state quarter releases, and my most vivid memory of ~2002 is when my parents bought a collectible display map for them at a mall. The memory is so vivid because I thought 2008 was unfathomably far in the future. Now it no longer is unfathomably far in the future.
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Grenadine Pink
hsl(356, 100%, 90%)
It is used sparingly, and is the color of the glowing around these blocks and links. Honestly it doesn't look like grenadine at all—it's more like a paler inner-lip color that may indicate anemia. Or, it's the pink of the horizon ~10 minutes before the deepest part of a great sunset.
To be honest I may have amped up the lightness a little more than is true to the book. What is on this website is more like the book's "Fresh Color," which was one of my favorites but technically doesn't fit the scheme. Don't tell Sanzo.
Saturation: 100% is how hard I go on this website lol.
Lightness: 90 seconds / minutes / days are my favorite intervals of time. Can't explain why. Doesn't include hours, weeks, or years.
About type:
Picking typefaces stresses me out a lot, so this website is built almost entirely with web-safe fonts: sans-serif; "Times", serif; monospace. (note: there are also web-safe color names!)
There are a few exceptions:
I occasionally use Hildegard von Bingen's litterae ignotae, the letters she developed to write her lingua ignota (using a font made by WurdBender on DeviantArt). I feel a personal connection to her for many reasons, and I use these letters to write something when I want it to be relatively secret. But I know they aren't truly secret—depending on what browser or computer or way of interacting with a website is used, some visitors may be able to read/hear it plainly. Many others cannot. And many who know and love me already know what it says!
I am using Jacquarda Bastarda 9 from Google Fonts for the h1 on this colophon page because it's nice.