Mastodawn

Reminder for those who may not be aware that those "fancy/custom text" things using special unicode characters that bypass ASCII fonts to make your name look cool or fancy or whatever ruin accessibility, like hard.

They break screen readers hard, since most, if not all, don't know how to handle them properly and end up pronouncing something like "Special character S" or whatever. They're also significantly harder to read than a user's chosen font, or the default fonts on any reasonable operating system or website, especially for neurodivergent and in particular dyslexic people.

Please stop using them, and maybe nudge your friends to stop using them.

Boosts appreciated for awareness

#Accessibility #FancyFonts #Neurodivergent #Boostswelcome

Li ~ Crystal System

@fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 hm i wonder if you could implement a "simple" version of your name thats not using special characters and then a "fancy" version too, and then just show the simple one to screen readers, you could even have a toggle for it .. maybe hmm :?

this way you can still have this way of expressing yourself, and everything else still works .. maybe ..

SphereSystem2 2d ago

@Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 Hmm, maybe a browser setting to only "display" ascii characters + overwrite fonts / text styling with a user chosen one if desired. Although that doesn't fix any text that is embedded in an image or something but for text as text that might work.
But then it also makes sense to just make text accessible when possible -TS

Li ~ Crystal System 2d ago

@SphereSystem2 @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 really you want to something to normalize unicode symbols that look alike so like 🅰️ => A and stuff .. i think iconv can do something like that .. but i mean this breaks if your not from english speaking culture still since ascii is very english centric

SphereSystem2 2d ago

@Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 Yes, that's true you need to also allow for other alphabets which ascii doesn't at least well. Hmm, maybe what you need is a sybol set between unicode and ascii, something that includes all the alphabets and nothing else, although that does mean trying to get people to agree to a third character set standard which oof.

Li ~ Crystal System 2d ago

@SphereSystem2 @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 the issue is unicode is for script from every language, things like æ and ß etc have actual meanings but also "look like" ae and B .. you need to know purpose of why their used not what is used ..

SphereSystem2 2d ago

@Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 Yes, that certainly doesn't help at all. Hmm, guess you would need a language tag included to filter for characters outside that language, but then that needs to easily be changed and runs into issues even then for anyone multilingual potentially, in our experience when people share multiple languages the language can switch mid sentence, let alone between them making any language tagging difficult.

Li ~ Crystal System 2d ago

@SphereSystem2 @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 i think doing it automatically just wont work and what you need is something like alt text for text, tbh but anyways

SphereSystem2 2d ago

@Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 You are probably correct on that, although given that people don't always use alt text already it is probably still mostly a social issue to be solved socially as much as a tech solution feels easier in some ways, sometimes there isn't one or if there is it's absurdly complex actually.

Li ~ Crystal System 2d ago

@SphereSystem2 @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 i think its partly a social issue, partly a technical one, screen readers not handling it properly feels like a technical problem, and things like an "alt text for unicode weirdness" seems like a possible solution to that, but then the social problem is that you'd have to get people to do that, maybe it'd get less pushback than just 'dont do this at all' though .. i suspect it would, as peoples names are like .. well yknow? .. but erh

SphereSystem2 2d ago

@Li Yes, it's possible that making some technical changes could help with the social issue, but it almost certainly can't be the entire solution, making it easier to make sure text is accessible helps but it's probably practically impossible to ensure it is purely technically so some social soloutioning is likely necessary as well.

@Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 Alternatively, screen readers could just be better about it, recognise when special characters are arranged in a way that makes a word, and parse that as a word rather than reading out the character names

Kay Ohtie 🔜 FWA 12h ago

@zuthal @Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165
Every time I see folks say "screen readers should just handle them as letters" it dismisses the fact they all are useful characters that mean things in other contexts, but the idea of "in certain circumstances" is the first time I've read a related take that feels vaguely viable.

I could see some folks going "aha! A use for LLMs!" but someone on fedi wrote a handcrafted "micro language model" -- his words analogizing it -- so my stream bot could detect when someone key smashes and automatically play the "password generated" event I've got set up for it. Extremely low CPU, could detect quickly in this case.

But that all still requires developers of these readers to implement functionality based on this misusage. Where do you draw the line? What about the folks who use those characters from non-Roman written languages that look like Roman characrers, like the racist "Asian font" generators?

@KayOhtie @Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 I think they should, without regard to content or intent, parse anything that a reasonable sighted reader would parse as being intended as funky-looking latin text as latin text. The one that would I think be the hardest one to parse correctly is "faux cyrillic" since there there would be some overlap between that and misspelled real cyrillic, and so ambiguity which to parse it as.

Kay Ohtie 🔜 FWA 11h ago

@zuthal @Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 But that's the question, how do you define that? What about an arrangement that shouldn't be read that way but looks like it could?

I personally find the take of "reasonable sighted reader", even as a sighted reader, to be dismissive of the purpose of the characters in their usual context.

I think the real fix is for more platforms to offer text formatting for posts and maybe even display names. It doesn't solve everyone doing it for weirder looking characters but it at least solves the reasons most people use the bold or italic or strike through looking characters -- because they can't merely use underscores, slashes, or asterisks for formatting it.

@KayOhtie @Li @fizzyizzy05 @0x4d6165 I would go one further and say that every website should allow at least full BBcode formatting in post text, which would also allow setting fonts different from the browser/OS default font, if not even full custom CSS for posts like cohost had.