10 ms·
I really like the idea of having a more bare-bones text-only web, but I can't get onboard with Gemini until it offers the same support for screenreaders as HTML
by Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I really like the idea of having a more bare-bones text-only web, but I can't get onboard with Gemini until it offers the same support for screenreaders as HTML. (For example, an equivalent of span lang=XX tags is missing, so if you quote a foreign-language word(s) in your text, you can't let screenreaders know what language to read it in). The visually impaired should not be second-class citizens in any new internet community.
- senkora 6y agoI would argue that that complexity should be handled by the screenreader through heuristics rather than the .gemini format itself, based on the desire to keep basic clients very simple (~100 loc). But that’s a really good point!
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoHeuristics might work for longer text where the sample is large enough to uniquely identify the language, but for single words there is not enough information. If I write "coin" in my text, for example, am I using an English word, French word, or Irish word? The pronunciation varies drastically, and screenreaders have to know what to say.
- mlyle 6y agoHumans need to know what to read, though, too, right? Obviously humans are a bit better at contextual clues, but.. the information has to be there for a human user to make the distinction.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoSure. A quoted foreign word might (but not always) appear in some context where any reader will know how to read it. However, for the time being, computers won't, and a screenreader won't manage without adequate semantic tagging.
- contravariant 6y agoWell if 'readable by a human' would be enough for screen readers then we wouldn't have to worry about accessibility surely?
- mlyle 6y agoSure. But computers spotting foreign words in context similarly to how humans do is a lot more likely than getting most foreign words appropriately semantically tagged.
- microtherion 6y agoMy go to anecdote on this is when I returned to Switzerland after several years in the US and walked by a bakery displaying a sign advertising a "Pain Surprise". If anybody ever opens an S&M themed bakery, the problem will be accentuated.
- StavrosK 6y agoOh that bakery has a gimmick where they throw a loaf of bread at your face when you enter.
- eternalban 6y agoNot strictly S&M :) but fresh out of the oven Sangak bread of Iran can offer a "pain surprise" followed by culinary pleasure! Picking those hot pebbles off the back of the flatbread on the way home in the morning is a cherished memory of my childhood in Iran.
- nkoren 6y agoForwarding this to a friend of mine who owns a BDSM-themed coffeeshop...
- amadsen 6y agoMy vision is good and I also don't know if the word you quoted was supposed to be in English, French of Irish? The point being, a screen reader has no more or less information than a human reader. It might be better then to invest effort in improving language inference heuristics, which would help in all applications (pdf documents, text files) than to try to build in support in each underlying protocol.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoPDF actually has support for language tagging, and using it is a recommended part of any guide to accessibility for the visually impaired. It may be that the language which a quoted foreign-language word is meant to read in was mentioned far back in the text. Human sighted readers will know how to read it, but computers won't yet (and perhaps won't for many years if not decades). However, there are visually impaired people now who need to be guaranteed the same Gemini experience as sighted users.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- progval 6y agoBut the screen reader needs to say the word, and the pronounciation of "coin" isn't the same in every language. I don't know about Irish, but it's radically different between French and English, the only sound in common is the "k". This means that if the screenreader picks the wrong language, then the user has to guess the spelling from the way it's pronounced to understand the text. Though I'll concede that right now on the web it isn't much better; but that's a failing of publishing tools, not the format.
- Snarwin 6y agoSeems like the simplest fix is to allow the user to ask the screen reader how a word is spelled.
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoNot unthinkable that's how a human will read foreign language too.
- wwn_se 6y agoHow would a user not using a screen reader know?
- detaro 6y agoThe difference is that the screen reader has to pick a pronounciation which could be wrong, a sighted user reading matches on the letters. Mentally matching from a wrongly-spoken word is harder.
- fckthisguy 6y agoIn multilingual text, a foreign word/phrase/snippet is often shown between << and >>. Not always, but often enough that it's an informal standard.
- CamouflagedKiwi 6y agoNot having the ability to do this forces the screenreader to solve the problem, and it's a really hard problem in general - something like "real" that already exists in English but crops up in Spanish contexts fairly frequently is tough, let alone all the proper nouns etc. On the other hand, there will also be a bunch of cases where people don't do the work to mark this up (maybe not even realising they need to)...
- jl6 6y agoGemini does support a `lang` parameter to its mime types, which can be used to indicate a document is in a mixture of languages. That could be enough of a hint for a client to tune its pronunciation. I do agree though that this is a far bigger problem space than HTML's `lang` attribute is capable of solving. It's not like knowing the language of the text always tells you the unique pronunciation of a string of characters.
- mysterydip 6y agoFair point, for example is it read or read? Maybe a better option would be a phonics tag or attribute followed by phonemes that no matter the language of the following word(s) would be able to be spoken by a reader?
- jl6 6y agoThat would surely place too great a burden on authors to do it and to get it right. Reading, as a discipline, is hard at the edges, and lots of humans don’t get it right either!
- ignoranceprior 6y agoI can't wait until I have to annotate all my documents like: <sentence lang="en-US-x-Pittsburgh" intonation="falling"><word pos="subject-pronoun" ipa="hi">He</word> <word pos="verb-simple-past" ipa="ɹɛd">read</word> ... </sentence>
- carapace 6y agoThat sounds like a fun challenge: make a voice-to-text widget that also generates phonetic or semantic annotations...
- TheDong 6y agoDid you know the chinese character '男' and japanese '男' are spoken totally differently? Okay, now try to read this comment with a screen reader accurately. Someone who knows chinese, japanese, and english will be able to pronounced both of those words correctly. There's no heuristic that can do the same. I should be able to annotate each of those characters with whether it's meant to be chinese or japanase.
- eznzt 6y agoIf you like the idea of having bare-bones text-only web then you will see how everybody and their granny have a feature that they won't get onboard until it is implemented. Then at that point we will have HTML again.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI'm more optimistic, I think it might be able to find its niche. I agree it would be hard to outright replace the web, but there's room for more than one way of delivering text. man pages are still around, for instance.
- robryk 6y agoThis is first I'm hearing about the lang attribute (edit: for something smaller than the whole document), so I'm curious how commonly is it used in the "web at large". Do you know?
- jayphen 6y agoIt’s very common to use it on the HTML element, less common to use it on elements further down the tree. Like many accessibility features of the web, it’s often neglected by developers.
- fckthisguy 6y agoI live in a multilingual country and don't see it used as often as I would hope, even if it's more common here than elsewhere. I often see it on elements/sections of sites that link to content in another language. Here, German is the "main" language and lots of documents are available in German but not English. If you need to link to a German page/doc from an English one, it's not uncommon for the link text to be in German too.
- simias 6y agoMultilingual accessibility seems to be a niche within a niche. I'm bilingual but I seldom read mixed-language content. And even when I do I wonder how often the author can/bothers to include the markup for it. If I write "ceci n'est pas du français" here for instance it'll remain untagged. I think the only websites where you can reliably expect the text to be tagged correctly are dictionaries and the like, where it can be done unambiguously and at scale (wiktionary seems to do it for instance: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coin ). In these case it seems like it could genuinely be useful. I've also looked at a few language learning apps (such as Duolingo) and none of them appear to use the lang attribute at all, even though it seems like it would be a perfect use case for it. I guess my point is that I'm not sure it's fair to blame a format that strives to be minimalist for having such a shortcoming for lacking such a very specific feature. Of course if you're a blind linguist you might have a very different opinion on the subject...
- madeofpalk 6y agoJust to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". People being able to use software (which presumably is what gemini is about??) is important for everyone, obviously. Imagine saying accessability hardware - like corrective lenses - is niche.
- grosswait 6y agoExcept it currently is even if it should not be. The number of people that know how to make documents or websites 508 compliant is surprisingly low
- cabalamat 6y ago> but I can't get onboard with Gemini until it offers the same support for screenreaders as HTML. (For example, an equivalent of span lang=XX tags is missing, so if you quote a foreign-language word(s) in your text, you can't let screenreaders know what language to read it in). The problem with this you'll get a million other people saying "Gemini is a really good simple format that the internet needs, but you need to just add feature X". But if Gemini added all those features, it would become as bloated as HTML/CSS/JS!
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoGemini is to a large degree a reaction to the commercialization of the web, all that huge load of Javascript etc. arose through the ad economy. Accessibility isn't that, accessibility is something that people trying to do business would prefer to avoid. But letting the disabled be first-class citizens in an online community alongside the rest of the population is a matter of justice. Adding accessibility features isn’t making a standard "bloated", it is simply doing the right thing.
- cabalamat 6y ago> Adding accessibility features isn’t making a standard "bloated", it is simply doing the right thing. Yes, and the other million people are going to say their proposed features are "simply doing the right thing". It may be that marking up what language a short except of text is in is a good feature to have (and would be fairly easy to achieve if Gemini used the Markdown format as you could simply us a <span> tag). A counterargument would be that traditional text doesn't do this, so a text file format ought not to unless it is aiming at being something more than what text does. But add too many features, the project becomes something else, is maybe less useful & doesn't gain traction. A Gemini project that is too bloated and thus gains no traction helps no-one, disabled or otherwise.
- mattmanser 6y agoReally feel you're on the wrong side of this one. It's not the same at all in my book. Especially if, as the author of the blog claims, it will never be able to be changed.
- Symbiote 6y agoThe lang attribute is also required for embedding Simplified Chinese/Traditional Chinese/Japanese/Korean text in a document containing two or more of those. There are differences in the display (font) of the same Unicode character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_language_dependent_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...
- miki123211 6y agoAs a screen reader user, automatic language switching is the first thing I disable. A lot of HTML templates just include 'lang="en"', and developers rarely notice that, even if their website is in another language. I find Gemini pretty accessible overall. There are no images, so including alt descriptions isn't even a concern. There's no CSS, so you can't make controls that visually look like check boxes, but are much less accessible. In fact, it's way harder to make an inaccessible Gemini site than to make an inaccessible website. The only gripe I have is the possibility to introduce ASCII diagrams, which usually aren't accessible.
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoThe specification supports images, any mime types, video, pdf, html and javascript, in theory.
- miki123211 6y agoSorry, I meant embedded images, like the img tag in HTML.
- alexwennerberg 6y ago> I find Gemini pretty accessible overall. There are no images, so including alt descriptions isn't even a concern. There's no CSS, so you can't make controls that visually look like check boxes, but are much less accessible. In fact, it's way harder to make an inaccessible Gemini site than to make an inaccessible website. The only gripe I have is the possibility to introduce ASCII diagrams, which usually aren't accessible. The provides an alt text tag to preformatted text blocks for this purpose: > Any text following the leading "```" of a preformat toggle line which toggles preformatted mode on MAY be interpreted by the client as "alt text" pertaining to the preformatted text lines which follow the toggle line. Use of alt text is at the client's discretion, and simple clients may ignore it. Alt text is recommended for ASCII art or similar non-textual content which, for example, cannot be meaningfully understood when rendered through a screen reader or usefully indexed by a search engine.
- 6y ago