Steven HoeferMay 5, 2023

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.

Show threadBjørn BäuchleMay 6, 2023
@troublewithwords These programs are meant to be readers, not describers, so saying "Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small T Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small H Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small I Mathematical Sans-Serif Italic Small S" should be considered a bug. Because you wouldn't read it that way, would you? cc (because via) @foosel
Show threadEd DaviesMay 6, 2023
@baeuchle @troublewithwords @foosel But those are the characters which are there. If they were be used in their proper context (e.g., in a mathematical equation) then you very much would want them read out like that to disambiguate them from other uses of similar plain letters.
Show threadBjørn BäuchleMay 7, 2023
@edavies @troublewithwords @foosel even in mathematical context, i would not want them to be read like this. Have you ever read a mathematical formula out loud saying „mathematical character E equals sign mathematical character m multiplication sign mathematical character c superscript 2“?
Show threadEd DaviesMay 7, 2023

@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.

@troublewithwords @foosel

Show threadBjørn Bäuchle

@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

May 8, 2023 at 5:34amWeb