Whenever I see something that doesn't quite work, I feel useless. Like I'm broken somehow. Like everyone else got the manual that I never got.
Is it me? Did I do something wrong? And I try something else, only to fail. Again. The same dead end.
Then that feeling of uselessness is replaced by a mix of anger and disappointment. Hot, sharp anger that makes my hands shake. Disappointment that sits heavy in my stomach like a stone.
I'm angry at myself for not being good enough. Angry at whoever came up with this thing that's only making life so damn hard for me. Disappointed because I expected it to work and it didn't.
The anger burns bright and fast. It dissipates eventually. But the disappointment? That feeling lingers for quite a while.
I get into this crushing cycle of self-doubt and frustration that comes when the world feels designed for everyone except me.
This will seem silly, but today I had this feeling just opening an ice cream box. I'm quite sure this wasn't about the ice cream box makers turning a simple ice cream box into a rubik's cube.
I bet it was more about the amount of inaccessible crap I've come across lately.
Every button that had no text, just a cryptic icon. Every video that played without captions. Every form that didn't let me tab through the fields. Every website that assumed I could see their pale grey text on white backgrounds. Every dropdown menu that disappeared the moment my mouse trembled. And every CAPTCHA that asked me to identify crosswalks or buses.
This wasn't made for you.
The ice cream box was just the latest in a long line of things designed by people who never stopped to think that not everyone navigates the same way they do. That screen readers exist, that what feels intuitive with a mouse might be impossible with a keyboard.
It was about every inaccessible website.
And it was about the ice cream box.