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From comments in other threads, I know of one other thing that makes these people's lives even harder than it already is: thїs їn рaяticиlaр. Yet It's been beco
by axegon_ 6y ago
From comments in other threads, I know of one other thing that makes these people's lives even harder than it already is: thїs їn рaяticиlaр. Yet It's been becoming annoyingly popular.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoCould you expand on what you mean? Is there some trend of writing English in Cyrillic script that I've completely missed?
- nordsieck 6y ago>> this in particular I assume he's talking about using unicode characters that visually similar to english letters, but are not actually english letters.
- axegon_ 6y agoNot Cyrillic in particular, all scripts(I just happen to have Cyrillic layout hence the reason I used it for my example), but if you go around blogs, twitter or other websites, there are tons and tons of people mixing those up to look fancy or whatever it is they are trying to do. It's a nightmare for those of us who know several alphabets and an even bigger nightmare for those who need to use screen readers.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoAh, OK. I haven't seen this much outside of screen names in some games. If people are going to do strange things like this en masse, perhaps the screen readers could implement some normalisation rules.
- axegon_ 6y agoSomething of the sorts could be implemented but this would be an attempt to make something idiot-proof. And from my experience, nothing can ever be idiot-proof. To quote Mark Twain: "they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience".
- rini17 6y agoIt can be found on Twitter when people want to tweet with fancy formatting.
- matsemann 6y agoNot sure if HN approves (it removes emojies at least, this went fine it seems), but there are glyphs that look like the alphabet/normal letters, but are not really the same characters, like these: 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔, 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘, ⓣⓗⓘⓢ, 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤, ㄒ卄丨丂, ｲんﾉ丂, ꙅiʜƚ, 🅃🄷🄸🅂, sıɥʇ, 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 My guess is screen readers can have trouble telling what it really says.
- onion2k 6y agoMy guess is screen readers can have trouble telling what it really says. It's actually the humans who don't know what it really says. We see 'some weird looking glyphs' and mentally translate them to letters we know. This quirk of the human brain is how we can read a random jumble of letters from different alphabets as English words. Screenreaders on the other hand know exactly what it says and they read it out precisely how it's written.
- hyperdimension 6y agoI agree, and I can only imagine how aggravating it must be to be a user with a screen reader having to (mentally/programmatically) parse the very "clever" strike-through-simulating special-purpose Unicode text some user decided would suffice for "real" strike-through text, just because HN is, uh, persnickety, with its allowed characters... I've seen it many times here at least. Just add an addendum!
- account42 6y agoWhat it "says" is whatever the person that wrote it intended to convey.
- onion2k 6y agoThat's obviously not true. Communication is a two-way relationship. You literally can't be an effective communicator on your own. If you write something in a way that can't be understood (with a little effort) by the reader then you failed to communicate well. If the reader is using a screenreader and you wrote in silly characters then you failed to communicate effectively, and you didn't convey anything at all regardless of what you might have meant.
- markild 6y agoI guess your username has the same properties. They're chosen because of some visual elements, and are hard, if not impossible to pronounce for text-to-speech.
- 30minAdayHN 6y agoI know it's pretty common in user generated text like comments, titles of the posts, etc. I'm not sure if they are a popular pattern in website content. I wonder if there are any popular websites that actually use this pattern. As it would be super bad for their business from SEO pov.
- mlang23 6y agoUser generated content is not part of a websites content? Please elaborate.
- 30minAdayHN 6y agoGood call out. I should have better phrased. I see two types of content. Published content and User generated content. Published Content is any content produced by employees who run the website or customers who are hired by the employees to work for them. Here content is controlled and there is some sort of oversight as content gets published and there is responsibility on publishers. Generally there are some monetary incentives to the publishers to do that. User generated content is any thing posted by any user. There are no monetary benefits to the users themselves. Not much oversight. Though there might be community guidelines, they are often not enforced. Consequences of not adhering to the policies might not matter much to the user. From accessibility standpoint, there is not much we can do for the user generated content other than educate them. In the end, it's user's decision whether to adhere or not. In case of published content, website owners have total control on what goes out to begin with. They can proactively enforce accessibility guidelines. For the comment in discussion, my observation is that glyphs are popular for user generated content rather than published content. And from accessibility standpoint, it's an OK trade off.
- mlang23 6y agoI get what you mean. However, I dont agree that "we" cant do anything about user content. Users will use the technology that is provided to them. If the tech providers dont care about accessibility ultimately, they will create tools that make it easy for users to generate inaccessible content. So I dont agree. It is not something the industry can do nothing about. It is simply something the industry is systematically forgetting about in at least the last 10 years.
- JimDabell 6y agoSame thing with putting the hand clap emoji between words to add extra smugness to a tweet – it's horrible for screen readers: https://twitter.com/aardrian/status/1159066496540319744 https://twitter.com/aardrian/status/1159066496540319744
- crazygringo 6y agoSeems like it's screen readers that ought to improve their reading, no? Instead of "clickable clapping hand sign quick graphic emoji" or whatever ridiculouslness it's saying... ...shouldn't the screen reader just say "clap", perhaps in a different pitch or intonation that one signifies "emoji"? The tweet can be perfectly read by a human being as "If clap y'all clap don't clap" etc... with the "clap" in a higher pitch or more emphasized intonation. The emoji are fine. Screen readers just need to improve how they read emoji. Which doesn't seem particularly hard to engineer.
- miki123211 6y agoAlso putting dozens of emojis in a Twitter handle. A screen reader has to read them all before the actual tweet is read. It's even worse with the new, politically correct emoji containing skin tones, as they're much more verbose, and the sighted don't even notice the difference. Sad face, light skin tone, sad face, light skin tone, sad face, light skin tone. There's also the problem of Emoji misuse, for example, using , pronounced as "globe showing americas", as the emoji for Earth.