April is Autism Awareness month with automated captioning

RantWoman will get more clearly to autism content in a moment.

First a word about use of Zoom automated captioning.

Friends at one local Meeting have received rave reviews for making Zoom automated captioning available. Another Meeting is not so pleased. RantWoman will not opine further about ways to adjust, strategies for dealing with the imperfections.

RantWoman was very grateful when settling in to last month's FLGBTQC worship to see the captions in use. Captions on a PC look great to RantWoman. On a phone, they hog all the screen space, a little frustrating if lipreading is also part of one's communications strategy. 

Later in that worship, a friend spoke, as RantWoman recalls of his own autism and of the autistic youth he teaches and how they receive or communicate information often more in signs than in words. Then the Friend said he was not sure why he was called to give that message.

The message a little bit brought RantWoman up short partly because of the Tweet stream in this prior post:

Isn't Autism Awesome?

Was RantWoman's wording perceived as hurtful? Were the tweets about non-speaking autistics meaningful? Listening to the message in worship, RantWoman was thinking "I see you. I lift you up. I lift up the people you teach."

Another autistic voice RantWoman is familiar with: Lydia X Z Brown. Lydia is a lawyer, a voice of Disability pride. She can be found on Twitter @Autistic Hoya 

One intern at the STAR Center openly identified as autistic. Just having things to file made her extremely happy. She also is considerably more challenged even than RantWoman about how to relate to sports.

RantWoman has met two autistic men who both apologized a lot. They both had persistent vexing but not necessarily objectionable behaviors and kept saying "I'm sorry." After awhile, RantWoman starts to find all the "i'm sorry" harder to deal with than just accepting the actual behavior.

RantWoman knows someone and realizes she does not know what pronouns they currently prefer. This person has Asperger's, in current parlance part of the autism spectrum. One time this person said they find RantWoman easy to be around because RantWoman does not make eye contact. RantWoman finds that person easy to be around because they don't expect eye contact. People used to eye contact are allowed to find ti belildering when there is no eye contact, and God still asks us all to get along. RantWoman also finds it helpful to know that other people besides blind people have trouble about eye contact.

There. Enough autism awareness for now.