EDITING CAPTIONS IS SO IMPORTANT

BY LAURA ROWE

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS are packed full of unrealistic expectations which leads to disappointment and guilt when you are unable to fulfil them.

Usually they are centred around personal enrichment. While this is something to be celebrated, it often leads to unnecessary pressure. Emphasis is often put on exercise and weight loss. Not only are they contributing to toxic diet culture, they make us feel worse about ouselves especially when we set unachievable goals.

For me, I make myself monthly goals: my January goal was to drink more water. They are very small things which all work towards personal enrichment but are much more manageable and flexible. What’s so good with monthly goals is that you can change them dependent on what kind of a month its been and what is coming up. And if you don’t feel you quite completed it then it just carries over to the next month!

Desire Paths

BY LAURA ROWE

DESIRE PATHS EMERGE as shortcuts where the constructed paths take a longer or more circuitous route.

A PICTURE IS worth a thousand words - but not to those with vision problems.

Illustrations, photographs, and graphics are often beautiful, but we cannot take for granted being able to appreciate them. Lots of life is translated into the infamous square nowadays. Yes, I am talking about Instagram. It has become an outlet to share life, news and literally everything in between. The app is a massive tool in information sharing for our Universities’ societies, colleges, sports teams and projects, and I would like to see them all uphold the EDI promise to include image descriptors when sharing their posts. You may think I am nagging over something trivial that won’t benefit the masses. Still, by discluding the descriptors you are excluding the more than two million people who are living in the United Kingdom with vision loss. Granted, they don’t all attend our university. That would be a bustling campus! But, the small acts of inclusion when they might not be ‘technically’ necessary are the stepping stones to a fairer society. A practice we take up now as students can be translated into the real world as we graduate and some of us step up to roles in the social media field.

With so many prompts on the app to remind you to add ‘Alt Text’ it is almost criminal not to. It needs to become a reflex when information-sharing through the medium of pictures. No award-winning poetic description with similies and adjectives is needed, just a simple explanation that can be processed by a screen reader. When your society posts its social schedule in a jazzed-up, Canva-produced timeta- ble, think of the people that might not be able to read it. If they or their screen reader can’t consume it, they won’t know about it. It shuts a door in their face.

Bottom Line: Our campus community is a defining characteristic of why many of us chose to come here- let’s make sure everyone is welcomed.

Once the path has been walked once, people follow that visibly existing route until a clearly visible path emerges. I’d never thought much about desire paths or how they come to be until I was walking with my partner who pointed out that the path we were on was called a desire path.

Once you start noticing them you see them everywhere – they’re all over campus! You don’t think much of the path that’s been deliberately made, but when its been created by hundreds of people over the course of years I think that starts to take on special meaning.

Now whenever I find myself on one I think about all the other people who may had walked on it and the connection we have with people we don’t even know existed.