Mastodawn

myrmepropagandist Jul 1, 2023

I try to be a good person but it's easy to forget that not putting caps in multi-word hash tags makes them terrible for screen readers.

It's important like putting the captions on your images.

*however*

It would be helpful if the web app of mastodon could please stop suggesting I make bad choices? #mastodon #mastodonSuggestions

(by the way what do screen readers do with *things in stars* ? seems like it should speak them more slowly as if in bold...)

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🌕 Chelsea 🌻📚Jul 2, 2023

@futurebird Not sure if anyone else has answered your aside, but screen readers are pretty dumb, so they don't slow down or emphasize text with *s around it. Mine just says "star text star," and some don't even do that if you have it set to read you no punctuation. Then it would just read the text as normal.

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Sam Levine Jul 2, 2023

@greengaybles I did not realize this and now feel bad since I've tried to look up how to get screen readers to give emphasis and the internet advice wasn't very helpful. Thanks for the heads up (I think maybe @JustGrist said something similar earlier today).

I guess the stars are better than all caps since at least they get ignored rather than annoyingly spelled out, but arg, there has got to be a better way (not that I'm a programmer or anything).

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🌕 Chelsea 🌻📚

@SRLevine @JustGrist Lol yes apparently several people said the same thing before me, I just didn't read all the replies. And honestly I think the stars are fine, because we understand what they represent and if the screen reader in question is set to read at least some punctuation, they're audible. They're not annoying or anything, at least to me, and I'm not sure what other option there is currently.