Rerouting

Migraines, the slow realization that accessibility is not the online norm, and a surprisingly stressful appointment kept us from getting much done last week. And that's okay. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that we can do less during a bad week instead of getting behind.

Ableism can hurt people by acting like they have no disability or by acting like their disability is the most important thing about them. Autistic people generally have communication problems. 

Khan Academy has a solid looking intro to JavaScript class. One of their pedagogical goals is to make every student type every semicolon to help students remember syntax details so they disabled pasting into their exercises and only accept direct keyboard input. That's reasonable for those students who type easily.
 
Speech-to-text or dictation tools are very useful for people who have trouble typing but can speak sufficiently well. When one uses an application that doesn't natively take input from one's preferred speech-to-text, the usual kludge is to dictate into a temporary file then copy/paste the results where they are needed. That's the exact function Khan Academy disabled in their intro coding class. So ignoring communication problems excludes a set of people from those classes.

And in the other ableism direction: One of my parenting tasks is to prep professionals to make a good first impression on my child with something like, "She sounds younger than she is but, like most teenagers, she is sensitive to being condescended to. She hates small talk so it's better to talk to her her like she's an adult engineer." Sometimes that works. But sometimes my poor kid gets stuck with someone who starts like they're talking to a ten-year-old, watches my kid get visibly stressed by it, and respond to the stress by using simpler words and speaking more slowly.
 
If I hadn't told that professional my kid's diagnoses, would that appointment have gone better? Did that professional err by focusing on "autism" instead of "teenager"?
 
A lot of factors go into deciding what to tell whom about my child. I've been making these decisions for well over a decade. But planning ahead for these decisions and assessing them after is still tiring for me. Dealing with grownups who treat her like an entirely different person is stressful and tiring for my daughter.