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Accessibility: Don't Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media
- eternityforest 2y agoWhy do the browsers not fix this? It would be like, five minutes to write a text preprocessor in JS to solve this problem,
- treve 2y agoIt's intended behavior. They are mathematical symbols and have a different semantic meaning.
- oniony 2y agoAnd yet every human that sees them used this way gets it. It would not be that hard for the screen reader software to do similarly.
- happytoexplain 2y agoDifficulty isn't the problem, as stated. The issue is that software doesn't know what "used this way" means - only humans do.
- IshKebab 2y agoPlease. You could get good results with basic heuristics, without even using AI.
- eternityforest 2y agoThey can just add a toggle to enable math mode, since I'm guessing decorative use is many times more common except maybe in school or something. I'm not sure I've ever seen a document where I'd want in read as anything but normal Italic text, the only time I ever see typeset math is PDF datasheets.
- oniony 2y agoIt would be fairly trivial to detect: configure the mapping to the Latin alphabet and run a few words against a dictionary.
- eviks 2y agoSemantic meaning lies in the semantic organ, which easily reads it as formatted not
- happytoexplain 2y agoMaking assumptions about the semantic intention of characters is dangerous (it falls into the category of "cute" behavior of software attempting to be helpful). If you do this, the reader will attempt to pronounce mathematical formulas like words. Admittedly this is a common mis-use of these characters, so I'm not sure what the best compromise is, but there isn't an obvious compromise (hence the answer to "why don't they fix this").
- alistairSH 2y agoIsn’t the “compromise” for platforms add proper text editors to their input fields (lessening the need for using symbols-as-text)? This should be a solved problem.
- rerdavies 2y agoIs it really a common mis-use? I don't think so.
- perching_aix 2y agoYes. I see it all the time on YouTube in video titles for example. Common with specific genres of music videos.
- p1mrx 2y agoMaybe you could train an LLM to recognize formulas (how else are you going to speak a formula coherently?) and treat the rest as normalized text.
- perching_aix 2y agoBecause it's not on the browser to fix it, unless it provides screen reading capabilities of its own, which e.g. Google Chrome doesn't. Instead, Google Chrome specifically will make a so-called accessibility tree available through whatever APIs for external code to parse and evaluate. The relevant parties involved are the websites hosting the content, the people producing the content, and the developers developing the screen readers (and potentially the admins who control the screen reader application that is deployed). None of these are the browser.
- Ukv 2y agoSurprised at how poorly most of the screen readers seem to handle it. Will avoid the characters knowing this (not that I used them much to begin with), but I do also feel it's something that should be fixed on the screen reader side. Completely understandable to fail at fake improvised fonts (like ꓄ꃅꀤꌗ) made from characters that just happen to look similar - but here the characters really are meant to represent their ASCII-range counterparts and Unicode defines compatibility equivalence/normalization to deal with it. Here the use is fairly frivolous, but most such character sets do have legitimate use - like fullwidth latin characters for readability when used alongside CJK - so really shouldn't just be skipped.
- happytoexplain 2y agoIsn't this by definition not a legitimate use? They are mathematical symbols, not linguistic graphemes. Readers could dynamically read out the description of every non-letter, though that could be more confusing than helpful in some situations. They could explicitly add these cases as letters, though that would make the reader attempt to read math as words. Simply skipping them seems like the worst option, though. Legitimate or not, it is in practice a real-world usage, so readers should probably account for it, though I can't say I blame them for not doing so. Deciding how to treat every block of Unicode case-by-case would be an impossible task.
- Ukv 2y ago> could explicitly add these cases as letters, Unicode already defines compatibility equivalence[0]. Normalizing seems like the most sensible default for me - then it'd handle ｔｈｉｓ, ᵗʰⁱˢ, and so on. > though that would make the reader attempt to read math as words. For symbols originally intended for mathematical use, it probably then makes sense to add a special case to read out like T-H-I-S. But I wouldn't say that's strictly necessary - even in mathematical expressions you can have variables that are words rather than single letters, and either way it's definitely better than just skipping it. [0]: https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Compatibility_Equivalence_Figure https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Compatibility_Equivalence_...
- 2y ago
- OutOfHere 2y agoHave AI write you a browser extension that replaces such characters with their regular versions.
- HenryBemis 2y agoI don't know why ppl downvote you (perhaps it's a lazy non-contributing response), BUT.. I am using ChatGPT to create my own Add-ons for little things/annoyances/improvements on my Firefox. They probably won't help anyone else, but it's fun to see an idea materialize in 5mins or less!
- OutOfHere 2y agoIt's because people don't want their silly coding jobs taken away, and they don't want others to be maximally empowered. They are shallow and feel threatened by what's happening.
- perching_aix 2y agoWhen the sarcasm is so strong it wraps around and starts sounding completely serious.
- cookie_monsta 2y agoIt's because that puts the onus for coming up with a solution onto the millions of end users rather than the handful of devs who created the problem in the first place
- bluefirebrand 2y agoThe solution here is not to tell people not to write this way, it's to tell platforms to do better about giving people formatting options for their text No one would be doing fake bold or italics if people could actually just put in real bold and italics
- Zak 2y agoBoth things can be good ideas at the same time. It's likely the case that large corporate social media platforms have thought about what formatting options they want to provide and have decided that they will make more money if they keep it as it is. Attempts to get them to change that aren't somehow connected to their profits are unlikely to succeed. It's possible to convince people to change their behavior by appealing to empathy, sympathy, or a sense of justice.
- michaelt 2y agoThe current behaviour is: no native bold or italic, but weird Unicode bold and italic if you know the weird trick. To me this seems unintended, rather than some thoughtful, considered optimum.
- Zak 2y agoI imagine it has to do with not wanting to add anything to the UI, though it wouldn't be hard to support Markdown with no visible UI.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Freak_NL 2y agoThat ship has sailed, unfortunately. On social media where no markup is permitted (or possible), people will use these to stand out — especially those who make money on those platforms (not much of a problem on Mastodon though). We, the people who know how this works, can explain all we want, but it will always sound like a hypothetical edge case, even though this does exclude some people from participating. The only way to stop this would to be to have the platforms where this is abused prevent its use (which would harm legitimate use too, although that is not nearly as prevalent as the 'I just want bold and italic'-case), have those platforms introduce minimal markup (not necessarily wanted), or have browsers and screen readers support these characters (not trivial, I suspect).
- alistairSH 2y agoWhat’s the reasoning behind lack of B/I text on social media? These are mature platforms, I can’t think of a good reason to prefer “math symbols as style” over actual B/I characters?
- reaperducer 2y agoMy guess is that any user input goes through strip_tags() as a precaution.
- Zanni 2y agoAbuse. Twitter/X allowed bold text recently for a few days, and a number of monetized accounts immediately started making all their posts ALL BOLD ALL THE TIME to stand out. Feature dropped soon after.
- eviks 2y agoThis would explain a ban on some high % of bold text in a post, not on making this % 0
- renewedrebecca 2y agoGenerally, Mastodon supports at least a subset of Markdown syntax. Putting text in asterisks for example, will render it in italics. There's no reason why the various SM platforms can't do this.
- hughes 2y agoIsn't a screen reader's job to audibly convey information on the screen as it would be interpreted by a sighted person? The original intent of the characters as mathematical symbols is obviously irrelevant in the examples. No person reading the posts with their eyes is thinking "oh hmm I wonder what is the mathematical meaning behind this bolded character". This seems like an example of a technical implementation that misses the point of the value that needs to be delivered to humans using the system.
- happytoexplain 2y agoSighted people can tell the difference between mathematical symbols used as letters vs used as math. There are ways to solve that problem programmatically, but the point is that it is a problem to be solved, not some kind of refusal to do the "obviously correct" thing.
- perching_aix 2y agoLaser precise insight. It just so happens that being able to "audibly convey information on the screen as it would be interpreted by a sighted person" is technologically nontrivial, even now in the age of advanced multimodal LLMs. All the while screen readers have existed for decades. So until that happens, another option is for people to just... not engage in Unicode abuse like this. Or at least be mindful of the fact that if they do, screen readers will take a massive shit, so if that's not their goal, they should reconsider. Which is what the post is all about (as well a general plea to folks to at least mull it over twice if it is their goal).
- eviks 2y agoNot sure why you need to jump to LLM hallucinations as some kind of advance when a much simpler method of looking up a sequence of letters in a dictionary would suffice "Existed for decades" sure, but some design bugs persist for centuries, that's not enough to be confident a fix is very hard
- perching_aix 2y ago
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoWhen platforms were more open (ahem, Twitter), there used to be a bot you could mention in the replies of offending posts that would post a recording demonstrating how bad/inaccessible the experience was with the offending content in screen readers. Used it a few times to demonstrate on some big tweets, good eye opener for ppl abusing math symbols. iirc one was to demonstrate when Wordle exploded and everyone was posting those little green and yellow emoji squares. Granted, that was not an easy one to solve and never really was as the best option, using an image of the results, was not easily do-able in the pipeline from game -> sharing to social. What really irks me is social media managers/content professionals posting that way on corporate accounts, sports team accounts etc, when they should know better, or bein accessible/inclusive should be on their radar more as it's been a topic of note for a number of years with the rise of ALT text considerations etc. Shows their inexperience.
- namuol 2y agoAt this point I wonder if it’s time we add a kind of markup control scheme to Unicode so we can finally have a standard for rich text that is backwards compatible.
- zozbot234 2y agoANSI escape sequences exist and are good enough for basic formatting like bold, italic, underlined etc.
- shakna 2y agoMost screenreaders also respect ANSI escapes! A lot are using a tty interface under the covers. However, HTML does not. Though, in my experience, getting Chrome to adopt something new, is easier than getting Dragon to fix a bug.
- deadbabe 2y agoAbsolutely no one should stop using bold or italics just because screen readers fail to parse. Screen readers need to do better. Bold and italics add spice to otherwise boring typography.
- alistairSH 2y agoScreen readers do actual B/I fine. Unless I’m missing something, the case here is using math symbols in place of B/I where the platform doesn’t allow native styling.
- perching_aix 2y agoThis is not about "spicy" typography but Unicode abuse...
- hotpepperishot 2y ago[dead]
- grayhatter 2y agoAccessibility: Don't use color in your paintings because there are color blind people. Thankfully, the other root comments here have all of the alternative suggestions. The theme of which is Don't blame the author because the [accessibility] tool is broken. So I hope you can forgive me for not enumerating them again. But I still want to take the alternative stance and assert you should use unicode in a previously novel way. Worry more about how you want to express yourself, and less about being well understood by everyone. Does being fancy here mean that it will be harder for some people to process and understand your message? Yes! But if that's a good thing or a bad thing should be reserved, exclusively for you to decide. The author chooses to restrict information, the site they used to generate the text. Because you can't be trusted to take their advice. And the chance that the person reading your text might be visually impaired, and the screen reader they use might choke on that text, is more important than what you want, or how you want to express yourself. I reject this idea. I wonder how they'd feel about upsidedown text, in an attempt to artistically convey the author's state of mind where they themselves feel upsidedown. I do agree with the author on the point that you should make any messages you wish to convey, as easy as possible for any one to receive them. But never at the expense of the message, or the art you choose to give your ideas. There are people who will never be able to understand you, and there will be people who choose to misunderstand you. And there will be people who tell you how you must express yourself, and it's seemingly always to make them more comfortable. Sometimes it's ok to ignore them, and sometimes that's even the responsible thing to do.
- perching_aix 2y agoThis will be a shocker I'm sure, but I think the demonstration (and the article in general) is for those who are receptive (or at least are choosing to be receptive) to this issue, and may not be aware. Not entirely sure why you think the assertion of your own opinion over the supposed assertion of another's is any better by the way.
- grayhatter 2y ago> Not entirely sure why you think the assertion of your own opinion over the supposed assertion of another's is any better by the way. I don't think my opinion is better. I'm disagreeing with the take that it's never a good idea to do something fancy. I think the assertion the article makes, which from my read can be reduced to: > you're wrong if you care about fancy text more than you care about screen readers Is problematic because, generously it's too simplistic. The author feels empowered to tell others they're wrong. So I want to do the same; because using things in weird ways they were never expected is the hacker ethos. And I think the world would be improved by more people coming up with more fun things, or doing things just because they're cool. We need fewer people who tell others they're wrong for doing something fun, and more people who do things because they're fun. In other words; because this problem can be fixed by improving screen readers, we shouldn't fix it by reducing the amount of cool shit people can do. > This will be a shocker I'm sure, but I think the demonstration [...] to this issue, and may not be aware. I'm not shocked, I simply don't agree. The author was able to write it as a suggestion, and make the argument using "should" but chose to assert it as an affirmative responsibility.
- maple3142 2y agoCouldn't screen readers apply unicode normalization based some heuristics, like seeing the continuous presence of those special bold/italic characters? To improve accuracy, it can even check if the normalized text resembles to some English words or phrases or not.
- mbirth 2y agoThis is great for probing scammers, though. Especially in non-English languages as they often use translation tools. And those have the same problem in recognising e.g. “ℍ” as “H”.
- waltercool 2y ago[dead]
- eviks 2y agoDon't underengineer your social media to fail at basic formatting
- cosmotic 2y agoTrying to be cute almost always has negative accessibility impact. Instead of building a long list of thing to avoid or things to do, I've found it easier to just avoid being cute.