Blind People Problems:

Lately I'm encountering instances where people writing substitute a small letter L for a capital i. For example writing Al (AL) instead of AI (ai).

This fools the eye, but not the text-to-speech engines used by blind and low vision users to listen to the text.

This morning I copy and pasted the title of a novel from the story graph and it turned out that the word Idea was written with an L (ldea) instead of a capital i.

I wonder what is behind this phenomenon. Is it a virtual keyboard speed writing thing? Saving the user the extra click on the shift key?

What is for sure, this practice is bad for accessibility.

Edit:

Since not everyone sees all the replies I'll summaries:

The main possible explanation for the use of an l in place of a capital I, was the use of OCR to digitize text in an image.

Considering the fact that OCR is built into mobile OSs and apps these days it is quite possible that is was used and as a type of AI it is clear why it would not understand the context and mistake identical letters for one another.

A second possible reason suggested in the comments was that people are trying to obscure the use of the term AI from filters or crawlers by using the wrong letter.

#BlindPeopleProblems #accessibility #blind #LowVison #TTS #TextToSpeech