Fediverse folks:
Using cutesy extended font tricks like ₜₕᵢₛ basically triggers a denial of service attack on folks who use screen readers.
Instead of saying "this" it says "Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small T Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small H Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small I Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small S"
Let's be cool the folks who have to use screen readers to participate in our community and don't do that.
@MisterMadge @troublewithwords sorry, y'all kind of made me dig deep on this now.
so, this is covered in unicode normalization forms https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/. it actually looks like this can be done by a browser extension, soo, i'll make one for firefox i guess
@MisterMadge @troublewithwords Here is a quick proof-of-concept. Works for the example in the original toot. I'll package it up nicely later, but would this be useful for instance? Also, no fan of this name, so would love to hear a suggestion for that (if its useful)
@joshbuddy
Dude! This is legendary!
I don't have access to a computer this weekend to try it out. What does "Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small T Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small H Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small S" normalize down to?
@troublewithwords
@troublewithwords
@ThermiteBeGiants
Honest question: how can we help screen readers handle this situation better? Who makes them, and where do we file bugs?
@troublewithwords
I would call for better options and improvements in screen readers, too.
After all, there a thousands of non-latin languages that deserve to get all the benefit of Unicode on platforms such as this that are also not friendly to screen readers, I suspect. As well, I'm sure there are unprivileged communities that use all sort of non-standard communication modes (think emoji usage among the youth in racialized communities).
I wouldn't do this, and agree that no one should without a very compelling reason.
But I also think there is something badly wrong if screen readers don't have an "ignore fonts" option.
@baeuchle Of course not, but:
1) The way a mathematician (or chemist or …) would read them out is very context dependent and
2) For most screen readers most of the time the vast range of odd Unicode characters are a really odd corner case and just using the existing Unicode database for naming seems a reasonable compromise vs bloating the code with lots of special cases.
@edavies @troublewithwords @foosel both of these are only saying „doing it correctly would be hard“ to which I agree; that doesn't mean it's not wrong and screen readers shouldn't strive to do better.
Normal letters don't have their unicode name read out, latin small letter d latin small letter o space latin small letter t latin small letter h latin small letter e latin small letter y question mark
@troublewithwords Agreed. That said the true way to solve this would be to pester Gargron for rich-text support so crude unicode hacks become obsolete. (text-to-speech should also be improved but the majority of them are still proprietary)
Unmodified Mastodon is the only Fediverse software which doesn’t even supports displaying rich-text, stripping all the HTML tags except links and span.
Meanwhile the rest of the Fediverse supports both displaying and formatting messages with rich-text.
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