Mathematical italic capital h mathematical italic small e mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small o.
WTF?
Oh, I just said “Hello” to you in italics.
(That’s similar to what someone who uses a screen reader hears when you use fancy non-alphabetical Unicode characters to simulate italics or boldface on your fediverse posts. So please don’t do that.)
@aral I do understand but it baffles me why the screen reader is unable to figure this out. It doesn’t seem a massively difficult thing to handle. And that would make a bigger difference surely.
@odddev@aral I haven't looked into it but I would write code to translate sequences like this back into words by converting the characters into their simplified versions and looking up in a dictionary. This is also the sort of thing that so-called AI would be good at. There must be a reason why screen readers don't do this. I don't have one so I don't know much but as a developer it seems trivial. I wrote Readable that solves a different problem but I could have a look at adding something.
@matadan@odddev@aral
I don't know how to find it, but I encouraged someone on Mastodon to solve this problem.
They ended up going through the UTF-8 spec and found a compliant method that let them combine string sequences into a compact form. I'll see if I can dig it out somehow
@MisterMadge@matadan@odddev@aral 👋 transforming confusing unicode sequences into something a little simpler is indeed part of the spec. i could never confirm with anyone who cares about this issue if this was a useful thing or not, so i didn't pursue it any further, but if there are users, i'm happy to continue working on this
I think @allo is right. The screen reader needs to read “Mathematical” so that the user understands that a mathematics script is beginning or continuing, it needs to read “italic” / “bold” because both notations may coexist in a (poorly written) problem, it needs to read “small” / “capital” because both letters may coexist. @matadan
@allo@matadan Formula blocks are only a tiny fraction of the contents of a science thesis. Most of the content is real text, where you expose the notation, explain key concepts about the calculus, introduce references in the litterature, and comment on the results. When you read “In the formula below, 𝐑 represents the set of possible combinations of states in our automaton, and 𝜎 is the weight parameter.” you expect to hear “math bold cap R represents”, not “formula below are represents”.
@allo@matadan Rather, auditory icons and fonts (like modulating tone, pitch, cadence or volume) would be a lot less obnoxious.
The notion of such uncustomizable UI angers me, but maybe that's just the result of being an Emacs user. The notion of not being able to reprogram my environment at a moment's notice sounds alien and irritating.
@aral screen readers should be made to be smart enough to look ahead for runs of characters all with the same style, and consolidate the description to only be reported once.
@aral Wouldn’t it be cool if Mastodon and other systems detected and converted this on the fly? Maybe requiring a special mode for advanced text to be read as math instead of converting these symbols to plaintext?
When did it become acceptable to pass on the responsibility for bad web UX to end users?
@aral Beyond people using screen readers having difficulty with italics, some people who don't but do have vision problems and/or visual processing problems also have difficulty with them. Depending upon the screen size of my device & if the site is setup for proportional viewing (as it should be) or not I'm among them.
There are other ways to arrange typed parts of things & they should indeed be used. #Accessibility#Tech
@aral Perhaps the reader app should also be more sophisticated? It is only because the reader app decides to vocalise formatting that this is a problem.
@iBleedIn6Colors It’s the poster’s fault if they know screen readers, for whatever reason, fail at rendering something and they use it anyway because fuck disabled people, amirite?
@aral If your instance uses the glitch-soc fork of Mastodon, you can use Markdown formatting, or even HTML to turn *this* into this. (If you do, the second "this" will be in italics)
@aral I hear this issue mentioned frequently. Why is there not a setting on screen readers to normalize these letters before speaking them? I would expect the case where you would want to hear the “mathematical italics small e” full name to be rare.
@SherlockHans
Screen readers do offer settings that can help, but the user only knows after encountering it. And this assumes all screen reader users are technically savvy when in reality the skill level is highly variable.
@aardrian@SherlockHans@aral maybe I'm missing something, but the default settings for screen readers should be a little more math friendly.
"Mathematical italics x" just sounds awful, even if there is a legitimate mathematical equation. I'm struggling on how to even represent a simple equation on Mastodon, so the difficulty isn't specific to screen readers, but at a start "x = 2y + 3" I hope would render as "x is equal to two y plus three" at the least.
@grimpen@aardrian@SherlockHans@aral There are years of precedent in the form of spoken responses at math competitions. That would be a good source to reference from.
@M_A_V_S_@aardrian@SherlockHans@aral YES! Exactly. I know we've wandered off topic, about Unicode look-alikes and accessibility into screen reader support of math, but I am disappointed (if unsurprised) that math is poorly supported by screen readers. After all the existence of KaTeX, MathJax, and MathML show that this isn't just a problem for screen readers, and it's also not an easy problem to solve.
@grimpen@M_A_V_S_@SherlockHans
If we want to talk about math, then consider that MathML support was only added to Chrome earlier this year (with some bugs).
If you also read my post, then you know screen readers take what browsers provide. So the browser has to understand it, parse it, map it to platform accessibility APIs, and hand it over to the screen reader.
@aral How about also fixing the screen readers? I'm not arguing against not using UTF8 special characters while screen readers can't properly interpret what was written - but since consecutive characters typically form words, why not teach that to screen readers?
@aardrian@pixelcode@odddev@thilo@aral The emojis one would be a good occasion to dunk on unicode standardization for not making compound glyphs combining colors and the flag (or other emojis).
For the characters ignored or treated differently, that really should be up to switchable modes in control of the user. That one actually is a bug in the reader (unlike most other issues).
As for the control you reference in your other post, Léonie Watson has been promoting the CSS Speech module for some time and could address some of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ainE38uwxdw
@pixelcode@aardrian@odddev@thilo@aral OK, true. How do you detect the language of the post? If you look no further than the lang attribute (or whichever equivalent in a word processor) I guarantee you'll get false results eventually.
@pixelcode@aardrian@odddev@thilo@aral I always find it funny that when people complain about "Mathematical italic capital H" I complain about "Symbol 1d43b", which is what I hear. Not saying that their complain is not valid (I would probably get fed fed up too), just that it could be worse.
@sukiletxe@pixelcode@aardrian@odddev@thilo@aral your reader either doesn't have a Unicode character table built in, or the one it has is out of date. Since new codepoints get added to the spec periodically, those tables need to get updates.
@odddev@pixelcode@aral That's an interesting corner case.
The screen reader could first read it as natural language. Listeners could optionally have it repeat, but have it interpret mathematically correct this time.
This way, the screen reader would mimic perception of the seeing - our brains would first read words, and then understand that it makes sense as a formula, tool
In other words, screen readers would correctly interpret math in-jokes.
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