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I do know that

accessportrayal is my community and I can make arbitrary decisions about it if I want to, but since the

access_fandom crowd is a big chunk of potential membership, I feel like asking opinions. I've been considering adding my own article, not about a specific disability, but about disabilities that magically go away, because I've had this happen to me and putting those experiences into words could be useful for writers who choose (against all attempts to persuade them otherwise) to go that route with their characters. Do you think that's a good idea (especially for fanfic writers who have no choice) or will it just encourage more of this kind of plot twist?

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one thing I've been debating a lot lately is the difference between

disabilities that completely go away, cured by science or magic

disabilities that are compensated for by some magical ability which makes the disability irrelevant (eg. You can't see, but you can see magic, and everyone is magic)

Disabilities which don't go away but are compensated by some entirely different magical ability (e.g. you can't see, but you are psychic)

Disabilities which can be fixed with adaptive technology (e.g. Geordie Laforge's visor)

Disabilities for which the adaptive technology actually give you abilities you wouldn't have had if you simply weren't disabled (e.g. Geordie Laforge's visor, actually; it lets him see in multiple spectrums)

and all of these are balances, of course. The fact is that my adaptive technology actually does give me some abilities I wouldn't have if I could simply type, and simultaneously doesn't do everything I could do if I could type. Science fiction, and even fantasy, can be great places to explore the possibilities of post-humanism. But as we all know, it's also a very dangerous road.

I always wonder why, when a piece of assistive technology more than compensates, it doesn't end up used by everyone? I'd like to see different spectra just because seeing different spectra sounds cool.

If you can see magic and everyone is magic, doesn't that still leave you unable to see walls and potholes?

Do you have suggestions for how best to address all of this in an article that's mostly only meant to be informative about what it feels like if it happens?

(By the way, have you considered contributing your own article?)

Actually, in the case of Geordi's visor, while it allows him to see different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, he doesn't see the band of the spectrum visible to most humans with much detail. For one, he doesn't pick up faces too well. This is how he sees Data. The visor also causes him pain. So it doesn't completely compensate for his blindness; it just gives him a different type of vision.

Data looks very... pink in that picture. In that case, it would be like Toph Bei Fong or

ysabetwordsmith's character, right? I'm not familiar with the fandom we're talking about here.

Yeah, it's just like Toph.

>>one thing I've been debating a lot lately is the difference
between<<

That's a good set of options to
consider.

>>The fact is that my adaptive technology actually does give me some abilities I wouldn't have if I could simply type, and simultaneously doesn't do everything I could do if I could type.<<

That's the way I tend to lean
when writing about compensated
disabilities. I have a blind
character in my Monster House
series who has a magical artifact,
but it 'sees' the world differently,
based on whether people or objects
have a destiny. So it's not the
same as conventional sight, and
that influences how she interacts
with the world.

>>Science fiction, and even fantasy, can be great places to explore the possibilities of post-humanism. But as we all know, it's also a very dangerous road.<<

These two things are equally true.

I prefer to scout ahead in
hazardous terrain, but that's a
personal preference.

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