3 ms·

Someone posted a video on Twitter about this. What happens is that it reads out the meaning (similar to the unicode names) of the symbols. E.g. 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 get re

Someone posted a video on Twitter about this. What happens is that it reads out the meaning (similar to the unicode names) of the symbols. E.g. 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 get read as "Mathematical bold fraktur small t, mathematical bold fraktur small h, mathematical bold fraktur small I, mathematical bold fraktur small s"

tikwidd 6y ago
I wonder if a screen reader could be smart enough to use OCR when it comes across an abrupt sequence of unusual character combinations like this.
- function_seven 6y ago
  I don't think you'd need to use OCR for that. Just* use transliteration tables to map those characters to the base characters. (* I usually hate when 'just' is used this way, I'm sure it's a minefield in some respects. But still more robust than trying to optically interperet what amounts to captchas in some situations :)
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    There are quite a few libraries for converting arbitrary Unicode to some subset while preserving as much meaning as possible (presumably by embedding such tables), and they generally work pretty well on this kind of text.
    - function_seven 6y ago
      Yeah, I've used iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $text) in my work to make sure I could accept arbitrary Unicode from users, and also send that same info as ASCII to legacy systems that mangled UTF. It worked really well. When I wrote the parent comment, I tried it real quick with a REPL on my own machine, but apparently I don't have the right combination of environment variables or locales or God knows what. Didn't feel like chasing that rabbit into his hole.
crazygringo 6y ago
IMHO, the onus is on the screen readers to improve. It should aboslutely be "smart" enough to simply say "fraktur this" -- to recognize a string of letters of the same style and specify that once, and to interpret the text as a word. It is the job of screen readers to convert the visual meaning to an auditory meaning as clearly and concisely as possible. If it isn't doing it concisely, then the screenreader is failing and needs some better engineering.

tikwidd 6y ago

I wonder if a screen reader could be smart enough to use OCR when it comes across an abrupt sequence of unusual character combinations like this.

function_seven 6y ago
I don't think you'd need to use OCR for that. Just* use transliteration tables to map those characters to the base characters. (* I usually hate when 'just' is used this way, I'm sure it's a minefield in some respects. But still more robust than trying to optically interperet what amounts to captchas in some situations :)
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  There are quite a few libraries for converting arbitrary Unicode to some subset while preserving as much meaning as possible (presumably by embedding such tables), and they generally work pretty well on this kind of text.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    Yeah, I've used iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $text) in my work to make sure I could accept arbitrary Unicode from users, and also send that same info as ASCII to legacy systems that mangled UTF. It worked really well. When I wrote the parent comment, I tried it real quick with a REPL on my own machine, but apparently I don't have the right combination of environment variables or locales or God knows what. Didn't feel like chasing that rabbit into his hole.

crazygringo 6y ago

IMHO, the onus is on the screen readers to improve. It should aboslutely be "smart" enough to simply say "fraktur this" -- to recognize a string of letters of the same style and specify that once, and to interpret the text as a word. It is the job of screen readers to convert the visual meaning to an auditory meaning as clearly and concisely as possible. If it isn't doing it concisely, then the screenreader is failing and needs some better engineering.