In the last two days, when discussing an accessibility project in a public space, almost half of the people that engaged with my related (very specific) questions have tried to comadeer the project.

I don't mind overseeing others' work, and I don't mind other people getting excited about a project. But I do mind somebody implementing a project I've been designing and assuming that they understand the problem well enough to write a solution... Which, when I tell them is not an effective or viable solution, they get angry, and then call me "ungrateful". It was, honestly, pretty shit. More on this later.

It reminds me of something I'd heard on Disability and Progress, though. I think they'd had in someone with a vision impairment who uses a cane, and they were discussing the occurrence of uninvited touch experienced by blind people. If I recall, she mentioned experiencing something along the lines of twenty occurrences of uninvited touch in a typical day, just out in the world, riding the bus to work, etc. They also mentioned some very very high assault statistics, particularly against blind women.

This segued into a discussion of unwanted "help" in which (in this case) sighted people do things like lead someone somewhere (kinda random that might not actually be where somebody wanted to go, and now they need to figure out how to re-navigate to somewhere else safely), move someone's cane, or whatever else.

This my experiences over the past couple days have reminded me of that discussion. The quote from this guy really drives it home:

"Complaining about the quality of help you receive is entitlement."

... Who shared the above nugget of wisdom after I "failed to be inspired" by him linking the github repo of a paid, closed-source, non-realtime service, when I asked the previous day about current availability of a mumble plugin for realtime auto-generated captions.

Sigh. Don't be like that guy. (And ideally, if That Guy is hanging out in your matrix, kick him.)

In the meantime, someone else has already written something unstable in Go using some cutting-edge AI that likes to caption laugher as "f***ing". And now I need to decide whether or not I re-design my project to build off of/fix/stabilize their work, or if I should build the thing I'd already designed previously.

Sigh.

If you must help, just send bourbon.