Where your favorite blogs come alive
Tone tags are not your punchline.
Tone tags like “/j” “/srs” etc are accessibility tools. They help neurodivergent people understand the explicit tone of written text that would otherwise be only implicit and therefore difficult for us to understand. If you use tone tags in a joking or disingenuous manner, you’re not only going to end up confusing a lot of people, but it’s also just plain ableist to make a joke out of an accessibility tool, something that a lot of us rely on to understand and communicate with people online.
Especially considering the whole point of tone tags is for them to be used in the most genuine, accurate manner possible, someone knowingly misusing them just means they’re doubling down on their ableist disregard for neurodivergent people who might read it.
If you post something somewhere as a joke but end it with a “/srs,” fix it. Delete it. Don’t do it again. Tone tags are not your punchline.
This disability pride month message brought to you by an autistic ADHDer