AdayThis is why you shouldn’t overuse emojis in social media.
🔗 Taken from the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People https://www.rnib.org.uk/
Mister Moo 🐮@Aday Honest question: could screen readers handle some emoji differently? "Clapping hands" could be a sound effect instead, and that's how I hear it in my head. Perhaps the Unicode Consortium could even specify one sound as an audio equivalent.
@MisterMoo I’m no expert in accessibility so I can only answer with my opinion, but I feel like that’s a good question!
I guess it would heavily depend on how screen reader users prefer to interpret emojis.
I can imagine that hearing the sound would be harder to decode than the description of the sound. Imagine the following sequence for instance: 🌊👏🏽🎬✍🏽🗣️🌧️🏀
You would need to pay a lot of attention to identify each sound, and then it wouldn’t work for all emojis, so maybe that’s why?
@Aday Maybe a tiny beep or other indicator at the start of the effect to distinguish it from other sounds? Just spitballing but it seems easier to change the way screen readers work than to get the whole world to stop👏doing👏this. I assume the person using a screen reader wants that product to acceptably reproduce the text they come across and I'm not sure "stop [CLAPPING HANDS] doing [CLAPPING HANDS] this" fits the bill.
Rajnhildo Ursidino 
@MisterMoo @Aday It would be easier to get the whole world to 👏 stop doing that.
L'égrégore André ꕭꕬ@MisterMoo @Aday Having had this discussion before (coming from the "just update the screen readers" side), I've landed in that it needs both tech and user changes, where screen readers should be updated with the colloquial use of emojis (like 👏 being read "clap" or "hand clap") and socmedia users should tone down the emoji use to something at least legible.
Problem is screen reader development is underfunded, and socmedia users in general won't change when asked, only when trends change :(
Problem is screen reader development is underfunded, and socmedia users in general won't change when asked, only when trends change :(
@MisterMoo @Aday (and I honestly do not know if ":(" will be read as "sad face" or "colon parenthesis")
@Mabande @MisterMoo beautifully balanced observation! I feel like both things can be true, just as you described.
bri@Aday @MisterMoo i’m unaware of any existing mechanism for breaking out of the speech synthesizer and outputting arbitrary sounds instead, but there do tend to be mechanisms for overriding how punctuation (including emoji) is read. in nvda: https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide.html#SymbolPronunciation
James J Malcolm@MisterMoo @Aday exactly. It’s easier to get a few screenreader apps to change their code than to invite millions of people to change their behaviour.
guyjantic has moved!@MisterMoo @Aday That was my first question, too: Why are we trying to browbeat several hundred million users into changing their behavior instead of a few dozen programmers?
soc@Aday People shouldn't suffer from shitty software – demand better.
This is 100% a software issue that screen reader vendors need to fix.
@soc it would be interesting to see screen readers stepping up (perhaps using AI?) and better adapting the content based on the context. But then there are many other implications at play, so while they figure it out, maybe we can be a bit empathetic in the meantime? ☺️ It doesn’t cost me anything to avoid writing like that.
@Aday I reject your insinuation that I'm not empathetic – you and me not writing like that (I don't write like this) is not changing anything in the grand scheme of things.
Even if *everyone* stopped writing like that, we still would have a huge corpus of pre-2024-07-18 text "written like that".
Emojis were encoded in Unicode in 2010. There is zero excuse for software vendors not getting their shit together for 15 years.
Tech should serve humans, not the other way around.
@soc That’s a really fair point, and to be clear, I wasn’t implying you’re not empathetic.
You’re right in that even if people who write like this stopped doing it, there’s plenty of “damage” already done. According to what I have seen, it seems to be true that screen reading software could use some help to put it lightly.
The question is, given that all of that is out of our control, should we use it as an excuse to avoid making things easier for others, or make them easy while demanding?
@soc Maybe I’m going too far, but I feel like we can draw a parallel here with climate change. Personally, I’m dissatisfied with big corps and certain countries not doing enough to fight climate change where it would make a real impact.
That doesn’t stop me from doing my part, even if it doesn’t seem to change anything. I apply the same mindset when it comes to accessibility, as much as I can. But yeah, tech should make this easier somehow, ideally.
@reinhilde @Aday Incorrect.
Scandinavian ⁂ Architect
Bishop Whitewind@Aday That's what it sounds like in my head when I type that tho 🤔
Ahimsa@Aday This style is also pretty hard to read for lots of folks who don't use a screen reader (me! 🙋🏻♀️ )
I know without looking that some responses are gonna say things like "fix the screen reader!" -- but that's not an instant fix plut there are a lot of different screen readers.
@ahimsa_pdx 100% agreed. Whether screen readers can be improved or not could be a different conversation, and I think it’s an interesting one! But it doesn’t excuse behaviors like this.
To me, suggesting to fix screen readers in this case is like saying “Make AI generated alt-text for images so I don’t have to bother making it accessible myself”.
There’s the technology and there’s the human behavior. Using tech to excuse not doing your part is… yeah, an excuse.
𝓐𝓷𝓭𝔂𝓣𝓲𝓮𝓭𝔂𝓮 𓀤@Aday @ahimsa_pdx It would be nice if the Mastodon clients could at least extract alt text from the image metadata when it is in there.
The Great Llama 
@Aday
Personally, as a person with no visual difficulties at all, I think it's just a terrible way to emphasize your message. We have plenty of ways to add emphasis that aren't nearly as aggravating. I have unfollowed people who do this too often.
Personally, as a person with no visual difficulties at all, I think it's just a terrible way to emphasize your message. We have plenty of ways to add emphasis that aren't nearly as aggravating. I have unfollowed people who do this too often.
@TheGreatLlama Maybe 10 years ago this was hilarious. 5 years ago maybe it was funny. Today, it’s old and annoying already.
Solinvictus 
@Aday I thought screen readers could distinguish the difference between emojis and text, after all emojis are an unicode combination 🤔
Annika Backstrom
Moon joy
Charlotte 
/Cinny 
@Aday The clapping hands emoji is a particularly poor example of this though, because it's part of how Black Americans communicate on social media. The criticism of emoji overuse can be done in better ways that are less racist.
NatalyaD@bright_helpings @Aday it'd be nice if users could tell screen readers "when you see x emoji, say y" which would make it read more as intended without senders having to change style.
ari :autism: @Aday clapping hands
Kevin RussellFix the screen reading software, as well. Starting today, thanks.
1 Button you push to ignore repeated emojis, lines of emojies
Push button 2. to ignore all emojis as a "space"
@kevinrns To be honest I don’t think screen reading software has reached its peak potential, but I’m also sure there are challenges we’re not even aware of, that go beyond this scenario, with nuances worth considering.
In the meantime, I’d say it’s kind to do our part given that, regardless of whether it’s accessible or not, this usage of emojis has become rather annoying, even for the sighted.
Aday (@[email protected])
@[email protected] 100% agreed. Whether screen readers can be improved or not could be a different conversation, and I think it’s an interesting one! But it doesn’t excuse behaviors like this. To me, suggesting to fix screen readers in this case is like saying “Make AI generated alt-text for images so I don’t have to bother making it accessible myself”. There’s the technology and there’s the human behavior. Using tech to excuse not doing your part is… yeah, an excuse.
Resol van Lemmy@Aday if you played that audio clip to my blindfolded self, I would've thought that the words "clapping hands" were actually part of the post as written and not... well, emoji.
Phil Johnston@Aday if you’re happy and you know it 👏. If you’re happy and you know it 👏. If you’re happy and you know it and you really wanna show it, if you’re happy and you know it 👏
johnaldis@Aday TBF, that’s pretty much how it sounds in my head when I read the text as a sighted person with an internal voice.
Leon@Aday i had no idea. this is way better and funnier than the visual version, i'm going to start spelling out my emojis. there's no reason we sighted folk shouldn't miss out on this. Clapping hands. Laughing man. Surfing dog. "The horns”. Party horn. yeah that's the good stuff.
Lisa J. Warner / Lisa LuvWhat is a screen reader?
gellenburg 
@Aday Anybody that has received a text from a friend that likes to over-do it with emojis and they're driving and they ask Android Auto to read it outloud can empathize.
Mark Gjøl@Aday Is that not the intended effect of writing in that particular way, though? Not to make life hard for blind people, but to be obnoxious and make you annoyed at reading the text.
Sven (Der Cybär)
Ylönën@Aday This begs for a further demonstration of why not to put hashtags inline inside sentences.
Nick Stevens GraphicsExpecting others to change behavior rarely delivers what you hope for.
Surely it should be an option in the screen reader to turn off describing emojis?
@Nick_Stevens_graphics does avoiding content make it more accessible?
Avoiding noise makes the underlying content more accessible.
@Nick_Stevens_graphics I understand your perspective, and I acknowledge you’re thinking of a solution, but I’m not sure it’s so trivial unfortunately. For instance, what is noise for me might not be noise for you.
@Aday
This is why I said it should be an OPTION, in the screen reader.
That way people can choose what works best for them.
@Nick_Stevens_graphics got it! Fair enough 🙂
The1goit @Aday it's funny that the voice they used is the voice used in dank meme videos. (it's called Daniel UK)
Shadow Cheetah@Aday *claps hands*
PippinIt took me quite a long time to train myself to be able to read these kind of posts without constantly tripping over the emojis, even when just reading it in my head! Accessibility helps so many more people than you'd expect.
✊🏾WiseGuyEddie@Aday OH DAMN. I'm an emoji abuser :(
Jette@Aday at least it now recognises the emojis. it used to just see the character string.
Chloé Raccoon@Aday @VulpineAmethyst While I agree with the issue/etc, "You 'clapping hands'" does sound like a great insult.
Ramak