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/
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.