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Opening of the first modules a new Gemini station

Jason McBrayer jmcbray at carcosa.net

Thu May 20 14:43:43 BST 2021

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Frank Jüdes writes:

The first version of Unicode was published in 1991, 30 years ago! The

first Emoji symbols were included in 2010, 11 years ago, that should

have been enough time for screen-readers or terminal-clients to

implement an adequate handling. Every Unicode character is registered

in the Unicode Database with a formal name and a description, which

could be used by a screen-reader to say something like »Pictogram of a

DUCK«. I am not experienced with screen-readers or braille terminals,

but how would those deal with for example fractions ½ ¼ ¾ ?

My understanding is that screen readers *do* handle things like emojiand mathematical characters, but it's annoying. Having a link text be"ROCKET EMOJI My new capsule" is not bad, but consider a bunch of emojisin a row, being read out to you by name, probably sped up 3x... Thenit's worse with aesthetic text, because something like "ℌ𝔬𝔲𝔰𝔢 𝔬𝔣𝔐𝔶𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔶" doesn't become "House of Mystery" or "Fraktur text: House ofMystery", it becomes "MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL H MATHEMATICALFRAKTUR SMALL O MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR SMALL U MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR SMALLS...." and so on. This is, arguably, a defect in current screenreaders, but it's also a misuse of Unicode characters for styling.

And if the screen readers adapted to that use of Unicode, what wouldthey make of "ಠ_ಠ"? Should they be prepared to read it as "Look ofDisapproval" rather than "KANNADA LETTER TTHA SPACING UNDERSCORE KANNADALETTER TTHA"? What about "(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻"?

I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like to be able to use these thingstoo, but when people who use screen readers say they're annoying, Ilisten to them. (This is based on what I've heard on the Fediverse; ifI'm wrong about what screen readers do, I'm open to being corrected.)

One option is to wrap studlytext or kaomoji in a preformatted block withan alt text. That way, screen readers can skip over them if the clientis configured correctly. That means you can't use them inline, butthat's better than nothing.

-- Jason McBrayer | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies, | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.” | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow