Izzy3d ago

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

Show threadLi ~ Crystal System2d ago

@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 ..

Show threadZuthal18h ago
@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
Show threadKay Ohtie 🔜 FWA15h 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?

Show threadZuthal15h ago
@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.
Show threadKay Ohtie 🔜 FWA

@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.

3:46pmWeb
Show threadZuthal13h ago
@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.