After a genuine effort on my part to vote in the @audioverseawrds, I’ve come to the hard conclusion that I am simply unable to vote. Not because I’m intentionally taking a stance against it—though I and many others have voiced concerns with how it’s run—but because I /can’t./

Let’s talk briefly about why AVA is inaccessible to me, an autistic, disabled, deaf person.

We’ll start here: to vote in any category in AVA, you have to vote in ALL categories. And not just that, but you have to vote for 10 (!) shows in each category.

There are categories where I don’t know a single show. To vote in those categories in a truly fair way, I would have to listen to at least 2-3 episodes of ~25 different shows. That’s A) not accessible to me as a disabled person who suffers from low energy,

and B) not accessible to me as a deaf person, because many of them don’t have transcripts. Listening to all of the shows is literally physically impossible for me.

“But you can just listen to the showcases!” You mean the showcases that also aren’t transcribed?

(And that doesn’t even get into how ridiculous it is to say that you can adequately judge an entire show based on a single episode. Do the judges of the Emmy Awards judge each show based on a single episode? Granted, I don’t have any actual idea how the Emmy Awards work...

... but I certainly hope that’s not how they’re run.)

I’ve seen the runners claim that expecting everybody who votes to listen to ~22 hours of showcase is fair because that’s what judges at a professional event do.

Hi, fun fact about me: I spent high school interning in the programming department of an international film festival. I watched dozens of hours worth of films to help pick which ones would be admitted to the festival. I did that for class credit. I would not do that for free.

So, we’ve covered how the AVA are inaccessible to me as a deaf and disabled person. Let’s hop over to my other disability: autism.

The voting form was so visually overwhelming for me that it made my head swim and my heart race. I couldn’t get through the first page.

I have to assume it’s also an absolute nightmare for anyone using a screenreader, making it additionally inaccessible to blind/low-vision people. The form itself is blatantly inaccessible. I literally could not get through it.

So, in conclusion: the AVA are not accessible to disabled people. At all.

I have a lot of other issues with how the AVA are run. I don’t think it’s run in a fair way. I think it’s run in a way that inherently favors privileged creators (if anyone wants me to elaborate, lmk).

But this thread isn’t about that. What this thread is about is the simple fact that voting in the AVA is physically impossible for many, many disabled people. Are you aware that 26% of people in the US are disabled? Are you aware that your awards shut out 1/4 of the population?

I’m tired. I’m so tired of begging for accessibility. I’m so tired of not being listened to. One of my friends brought accessibility concerns directly to someone involved with the AVA and was dismissed, so I can’t imagine they’ll listen to this tweet thread.

I just want to raise awareness of how inaccessible these are and why your disabled friends may not be able to vote in them. I genuinely wanted to. I genuinely could not.

And to the people who run the AVA: If you see this and you’re genuinely interested in improving, please DM me. My freelance rate is $100/hr. Blessed be