Welcome :)

Imagine a social media experience where you log into one place and get all your content from across the Internet. Imagine a social media experience where you can follow people who post about interesting things, but also repost a lot of nonsense, and you can enjoy the best of them without putting yourself or the other person out. Imagine a social media experience where the reactions are hidden and what you’re left with are people who take the time to have meaningful discussion with you about your content. This is The Starship Changeling.

My experience is The Starship Changeling. The developer of micro.blog doesn’t describe his content management system as social media, but he’s got one of the most accessible forms of the future of social media, I feel, so I switched.

My Name is Randy

My name is Randy and I often go by Changeling. If you’re wondering why a government name and fun name are being used at the same time, here’s what happened.I used to be an Assistive Technology instructor for people with visual impairments, CATIS certified and all. For reasons way beyond the scope of an introduction post, I am now an accessibility and inclusion specialist for the organization I used to teach for. At the same time I was an instructor, I began interacting with more online communities.

In these communities, I went and still go by Changeling. Wonderful, right? Nice separation of casual and official life, but here’s the deal. Because I’m blind and it is one of those disabilities that has wide-ranging impacts both subtle and explicit, there’s no way for me to get away from my circumstances by adopting a digital life like many people can and do. Ready Player one? I look forward to it. Player two, I dream about it. Rogue AI god aside.

Because of this, I still had to advocate to get my needs met. I began doing accessibility testing and checking for people, reviewing their social media posts, online stores, websites and, in one instance, a consultation about image descriptions for an envelope-book via Twitter DM. I always did this without asking for compensation. I wanted in those spaces, and I was the one who knew what I needed to be functional in them, so charging felt wrong to me.

Furthermore, I didn’t often have the opportunity to teach special topics I thought were awesome. I started writing guides for using online platforms. The ones I’m most known for are Changeling’s Guide to Mastodon and Discord for screen readers. (Note: If you’re wondering about the whereabouts of said guides, I am currently in the process of updating them and reworking them to reflect requests from people who found it useful and saw ways to make it more user friendly.) I was building an extensive though untraditional resume under this name. The Discord guide even made it into an issue of Top Tech Tidbits.

Then I became an accessibility and inclusion specialist as a day job, and I saw a personal choice for myself. I could do my job based on my traditional credentials alone, collecting credentials more specific to this role as I go, abandoning a resume of experience I came by honestly and fairly and honestly and that directly benefits my knowledge reputation in my day job, or I could spruce up my home on the Internet and turn it into a tool that displays valid though unorthodox credentials. For the record, I think it’s going to be a yes and situation, meaning both methods are going to be used, said method to be determined by the situation.

About Surface Me

I love roller coasters, horror novels and music. I am also the human partner in crime to a cat named Alex.

Content

Here are the things I talk about. You can also find this information on the the Archive or feeds pages.

  • Accessibility
  • Blindness-related topics
  • Tech
  • Games
  • Music
  • Books
  • Movies
  • TV
  • Observations and humor
  • Events I attend
  • And anything else I want.

You can also use the Feeds page and an RSS reader of your choice to subscribe to those topics that are of interest to you. Finally, visit the nurture your inner alien page to subscribe to the email newsletter. Be aware, however, this is only set to deliver a weekly digest of all posts. As you may be realizing, this email would be quite large.

If you are a screen reader user, your best bet for consistent navigation around pages is to use the landmarks or regions feature. There are three main areas.

  • Navigation: Lists all pages for the site.
  • main: The area that displays the most recent posts.
  • Footer: Has links to my other corners of the Internet.

You can also use the articles feature of your screen reader to quickly move between posts in the main area.

Interacting

As mentioned before, my starship is now completely free of likes, reposts and followers counts. I’m not saying you can’t do those things, but I will remain unaware of them. Let’s look at how we can effectively interact with each other.

  • Fediverse: If you’re on Mastodon or any other service that support ActivityPub and The Fediverse, you can hit the reply button, compose your response and send it.
  • micro.blog: If you are following me with your account, the reply link follows each post, as does a link to view an entire conversation.
  • Reply by email: I renamed this link to “send an intergalactic transmission’. Click this, and your default email program prefilled with my email address and the post title or excerpt as the subject line. Compose your email, hit send and I’ll have your message.
  • I’ll respond to you via the method you choose.

More info

See the about page for more information.

Thank you, and enjoy your ride on the Starship Changeling!🎢🎢🎢