Those of you using cutesy font/display settings in your usernames — cursive, flipped, reversed order, or rotated/upside-down letters — please understand that this is aggressively hostile to users of screen reader software, which will announce each character in exhaustive, technical detail. Please don’t do this. It becomes a massive speed-bump in their timelines. If failing to use alt tags on images is passively bad, this is actively bad. #accessibility#Mastodon
@tantramar For those in the replies who were saying that an example would help people understand the issue, here is a video that was pretty widely seen on twitter a few years ago.
A username is much shorter, of course, but this still illustrates how utterly incomprehensible they would be, as well as the delay in getting to the good stuff caused by all the glyph names being stated.
@tantramar while I agree entirely with the point being made let’s be mindful of language usage. Let’s not conflate aggression and hostility with ignorance. I very much doubt most such folk have funky usernames with the express intent of antagonising those that depend on screen readers. Attacking them rather than encouraging and educating may lead to apathy or doubling-down on it.
@tantramar I use a weird runic font on my phone, but that's completely local. I will freely admit that it has been said to be an accessibility issue for anyone I happen to and my phone too. 😅
Ironically I think a screen reader wouldn't even notice.
@tantramar I absolutely love that shit like this is the biggest drama I see on Mastodon. So pleasant yet still scratches the itch of "Ooooh, better read the replies to see if they're spicy."
@tantramar This comment (and the replies) is educating me about something important which I had no clue about. Thank you! Feeling glad to be part of mastodon right now.
I appreciate knowing this, but unsure if it’s as big a problem as stated. The way mastodon allows users so much control over their feeds, I assume someone using screen reader software wouldn’t follow someone with the name “upside down n upside down u upside down r upside down s upside down e cursive t cursive o cursive n cursive y cursive f,” because it would be a drag on their timeline. Maybe I’m missing something.
@tony This is equivalent to “why don’t people who need ramps in curbs just walk somewhere else?” Is it only a big problem if it affects you directly? @Burnt_Veggies
@tantramar@Burnt_Veggies
except it's not actually equivalent because we have lots more choices over who to follow in fedi vs having to use roads and sidewalks to go places like the grocery store. If anyone doesn't like what i say or how i say it, they don't have to follow me. nor i them. we don't have to read annoying things the same way we have to buy groceries. i could try to moderate anything anyone says to suit my liking, or i could control the things within my power to control.
@tantramar No argument here, but do you know any of the technical background for why screen readers haven't adapted to this? I've been taking this into consideration for social media for about a decade. If I were a user of a screen reader, I'd be pretty upset at the stagnant state of this issue.
I ask because as a developer I've learned that when a long standing problem seems trivially solvable to me, then I'm definitely not seeing the whole picture.
@mythmon one suspects the intersection of capitalism and ableism. I’ve been making websites since 1993, and “it works fine for me; why should I care about anyone else (w a different OS/device/screen size/set of or lack of disabilities)?” is disturbingly common. Accessibility is usually an afterthought at best, and looked on with hostility if there’s a cost involved.
@tantramar Accessibility is still a poopshow. (trying to use fewer swear words.) It is not god's law for it to be this way, it's laziness and bad attitudes. I've been fighting for better accessibility for software documentation in my whole tech writing writing career. Just plain old text docs, pretty simple to solve, but you would not believe the resistance from the bosses.
Oh, and anyone else pointing out my Canadian flag emoji as some sort of clever gotcha is getting blocked. Emoji aren’t the issue, and you’ve earned it.
@darrendilieto I believe they just read out the name of the emoji — no need for alt text (nor do I know of any way to add alt text directly to them, anyway.
@tantramar So I've looked at the source code of a few popular websites, and they all tend to do something different when displaying emojis. But the MacOS VoiceOver seems to name the emoji without issues or doing anything weird, which is good to know.
@tantramar Back in the dim & distant days of the Other Place, I briefly had Unicode maths glyphs in my username until I was informed that it was bad. So I stopped. It occurs to me, listening to that video, that it might not be very nice when a screenreader reads those things out in their correct (mathematical-equation) context either.
@tantramar: This screen reader software needs to get its Unicode support improved. It's not like figuring out that there's a bunch of similarly fancy letters so they make a fancy word takes some hard effort; all the mappings are explicitly in Unicode databases. Screen reader software that doesn't recognise this stuff properly is just held back by lazy capitalists.
Rotated letters, well, that might require some AI to figure out.
@tantramar I think many people would need to hear a clip of how bad it is, before they really understand the issue.
Hearing the screen reader speaking an entire sentence by enumerating each letter with "mathematical fraktur {name of letter}" is painful.
My municipality has a Facebook account and trying to spice things up, they were using those Unicode symbols as text on their posts. I enabled to the screen reader to test and it was extremely painful to try and parse what it actually said.
@tantramar How does it do that? Something like “an l rotated 90 degrees” sideways or something to describe this? I didn’t know this myself. I’m betting a lot of people don’t know that. Maybe eventually they’ll build into the code a way to have those characters but not have issues with screen readers.
@tantramar Spot on, and no it's not up to screen readers to parse them. they're technically maths symbols which I imagine if they were read as regular letters it could cause problems.
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