7 ms·

Could 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 ago
Not 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 ago
  Ah, 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 ago
    Something 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 ago
    It can be found on Twitter when people want to tweet with fancy formatting.
matsemann 6y ago
Not 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 ago
  My 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    What it "says" is whatever the person that wrote it intended to convey.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      That'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 ago
I 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.

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 ago

Not 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 ago
Ah, 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 ago
  Something 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 ago
  It can be found on Twitter when people want to tweet with fancy formatting.

matsemann 6y ago

Not 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 ago
My 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  What it "says" is whatever the person that wrote it intended to convey.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    That'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 ago

I 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.