@kristinHenry

It seems so obvious when it it's explained like that. I don't have anything interesting to say but I'll try to remember this

@kristinHenry I've seen mention in previous toots that it's better to capitalise hashtags instead making them all lowercase. It helps Screenreaders identify the individual words.

#ScreenReaders

@kristinHenry Thank you very much for pointing this out. I mistakenly thought it was more intelligible to use inline hashtags. I did not think about the fact that the reader would have to somehow indicate that it was a hashtag. I'll change this from now on. Frankly, I've learned more about accessibility from 10 days on Mastodon than from probably four years on twitter.

#Mastodon #Access

@kristinHenry Not just about screenreaders! Seeing posts hashtagged like that just feels... weird, for some reason. I bet it feels Brandy™. Either way it's harder to read, a bit visually overwhelming, just like when people randomly sprinkle emoji everywhere (though not nearly as bad).

At the end is definitely nicer all around.

@kristinHenry Yeah it's better to organise well the message.

Although sometime I use the hashtag inside a phrase because it is a bit of a waste to repeat the word twice. Once in the phrase and once as a hashtag at the bottom. But it's no biggies to do it either indeed , to help the visually impaired.
Maybe the UI / code could also do it and have a visually impaired option that would transform the appearance like that automatically.

@kristinHenry

useful. thank you

@kristinHenry This is very useful information. Thank you.

I wonder if the issue is a result of limiting characters in some sites? Because I tend to make the hashtags part of the main body of text, in order to save space.

Another way around this would be to develop a screen reader that doesn’t say the hashtag, but instead reads them and then says them at the end of the paragraph.

@kristinHenry Great idea, although I'm shockingly guilty of not doing that myself!

Time to look at my pinned post & bio!

#betterhashtags

@kristinHenry Great point and well made. Would it theoretically be possible to give people an accessibility setting in Mastodon to re-format posts to strip the main body of hashes and append them as a list at the bottom, as you suggest?

Might even be able to make that a browser plugin

@kristinHenry
A compelling argument to add a setting to the screenreader to turn off the reading of the hashtag instead of doubling up words.

The 500 limit common on instances (I've seen one with 2^16 !) is refreshing compared to #Twitter, but I've already typed posts that still use the whole allotment and reworded sentences to get into the limit.