9 ms·

Because my screen reader does not know how to read the symbol and reads gibberish?

dhritzkiv 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what does your screen reader emit? "Acute accented C"? And would the onus not be on the screen reader to not produce gibberish for a simple letter?
- gostsamo 5y ago
  It has a default placeholder pronunciation for unknown symbols. Neither english or my native language have accents in their letters and creating a lookup table for all the unicode material out there might've been considered impractical or performance-hitting for the developers. Personally, I'm okay with that because symbols with long pronunciations create overhead when reading and a few of them make a text practically unintelligible.
  - dhritzkiv 5y ago
    Makes sense. Thanks for explaining.
  - estebank 5y ago
    I try to be mindful of making my software as accessible as possible, but the following > creating a lookup table for all the unicode material out there might've been considered impractical or performance-hitting for the developers. just doesn't ring true to me in any way for current software. I understand that people can be using older software, which is why I strive to restrict myself to ASCII as much as possible for the widest possible support for my users, but my software also supports unicode identifiers, up to and including a whole unicode table to talk about confusables[1]. And not all TTS software "ignores" characters, which is why people advice against using 𝑓𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑦 unicode because it doesn't get read as text but instead each character is described individually. (This is also something that TTS software should support for their users' sake, but I digress.) To be clear, it is reasonable to be practical and cater to the software as it exists, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ask for better software. [1]: this is thanks to the crate unic-udc containing this information: https://github.com/open-i18n/rust-unic https://github.com/open-i18n/rust-unic
    - gostsamo 5y ago
      I think that you touched one of the reasons why not all unicode characters are supported. You said that it is not recommended to use identifiers with confusables because they will be wasting the time of the SR user. Imagine though that someone decides to write an entire text in english using lets say the french or german alphabet, putting accented or umlauded letters everywhere where it is possible. Now, one can say "lets convert the confusable to the main form and read it like that", but what happens if you stumble upon a new text where there is a meaningful difference between the accented and not accented letters? The situation is not hypothetical, because very often one can find either a multilanguage document or a book with with names and single words in another language.
mattigames 5y ago
Weird, it's just a "c" with an acute accent, most basic fonts (Arial, Courier new, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Comic sans) support it and screen readers should fallback to any of those https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0107/fontsupport.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0107/fontsuppo...
- gostsamo 5y ago
  The role of a screen reader is not to recognize the fond, this is job of the hosting application (os, browser). A screen reader takes the text and converts it to sound. As I wrote in my other comment, not all unicode symbols are mapped and part of them are skipped because of lack of capacity or due to performance.
  - flemhans 5y ago
    I'm astonished about how much fuss a simple non-ascii character can make for people in this thread, as if it's the first time people see it. I use such characters every day because my native language has them, so maybe that's why my tooling is naturally chosen/adapted to support it.
    - gostsamo 5y ago
      You are quite correct. I'm from Eastern Europe and consider your own reaction if I right a tool which has a name in cyrillic and every time you need to use it or search its functionality, you need to perform a complex incantation trying to remember the exact steps to generate something that at a glance looks just like "рир".
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Sounds like the screen reader's problem. They better get on fixing that
- gostsamo 5y ago
  You are not wrong, but you are not right either. See my explanations under other comments. I'd say that in their attempt to be fancy, the authors of the project are making its usage unnecessarily unpleasant.

Out of curiosity, what does your screen reader emit? "Acute accented C"? And would the onus not be on the screen reader to not produce gibberish for a simple letter?

gostsamo 5y ago
It has a default placeholder pronunciation for unknown symbols. Neither english or my native language have accents in their letters and creating a lookup table for all the unicode material out there might've been considered impractical or performance-hitting for the developers. Personally, I'm okay with that because symbols with long pronunciations create overhead when reading and a few of them make a text practically unintelligible.
- dhritzkiv 5y ago
  Makes sense. Thanks for explaining.
- estebank 5y ago
  I try to be mindful of making my software as accessible as possible, but the following > creating a lookup table for all the unicode material out there might've been considered impractical or performance-hitting for the developers. just doesn't ring true to me in any way for current software. I understand that people can be using older software, which is why I strive to restrict myself to ASCII as much as possible for the widest possible support for my users, but my software also supports unicode identifiers, up to and including a whole unicode table to talk about confusables[1]. And not all TTS software "ignores" characters, which is why people advice against using 𝑓𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑦 unicode because it doesn't get read as text but instead each character is described individually. (This is also something that TTS software should support for their users' sake, but I digress.) To be clear, it is reasonable to be practical and cater to the software as it exists, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ask for better software. [1]: this is thanks to the crate unic-udc containing this information: https://github.com/open-i18n/rust-unic https://github.com/open-i18n/rust-unic
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    I think that you touched one of the reasons why not all unicode characters are supported. You said that it is not recommended to use identifiers with confusables because they will be wasting the time of the SR user. Imagine though that someone decides to write an entire text in english using lets say the french or german alphabet, putting accented or umlauded letters everywhere where it is possible. Now, one can say "lets convert the confusable to the main form and read it like that", but what happens if you stumble upon a new text where there is a meaningful difference between the accented and not accented letters? The situation is not hypothetical, because very often one can find either a multilanguage document or a book with with names and single words in another language.

mattigames 5y ago

Weird, it's just a "c" with an acute accent, most basic fonts (Arial, Courier new, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Comic sans) support it and screen readers should fallback to any of those https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0107/fontsupport.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0107/fontsuppo...

gostsamo 5y ago
The role of a screen reader is not to recognize the fond, this is job of the hosting application (os, browser). A screen reader takes the text and converts it to sound. As I wrote in my other comment, not all unicode symbols are mapped and part of them are skipped because of lack of capacity or due to performance.
- flemhans 5y ago
  I'm astonished about how much fuss a simple non-ascii character can make for people in this thread, as if it's the first time people see it. I use such characters every day because my native language has them, so maybe that's why my tooling is naturally chosen/adapted to support it.
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    You are quite correct. I'm from Eastern Europe and consider your own reaction if I right a tool which has a name in cyrillic and every time you need to use it or search its functionality, you need to perform a complex incantation trying to remember the exact steps to generate something that at a glance looks just like "рир".

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Sounds like the screen reader's problem. They better get on fixing that

gostsamo 5y ago
You are not wrong, but you are not right either. See my explanations under other comments. I'd say that in their attempt to be fancy, the authors of the project are making its usage unnecessarily unpleasant.