Kai

would be great if custom reader mappings could be made for certain strings at the OS level and/or by app.

The developer has some control over what a screen reader sees, but obviously that doesn't work so well places where the content comes from other people It would be great if there was a standard that meant devs for apps/sites and the reader could always know how to interact

As it is now, even the most basic things like text elements that are hidden to visual users but will be read out by a screen reader only work with most screen readers But then even with web access standards most of the internet is inaccessible, so there's a long way to go

yep. this in theory could be a third-party plugin that has a user-defined mapping of common complex strings (and what to voice them as), but wouldn’t perfect; you’d always have to manually set the replacement per string, and of course people *change* their display names, e.g.

One of the software combos I use has the option to regex in the correct pronunciation, which is great But I don't know if it's possible to regex emoji, else I'd definitely add "if more than 3, say nothing/just extract simple chars" (and yes regex is definitely a verb shh)

in theory it should be possible to regex emoji in such software, since the character codes are stardardized. definitely a feature worth requesting/upvoting, or for me, a non-user, still advocating for.

When I have more brain I'll play around with regex options and see what I can come up with And then post it for the vast majority of people using the same software who don't have a programming background

And then I'll tell all the companies behind the screen readers that I shouldn't need that background to use their software If I can do it with my limited regex skills, they can definitely add in a gui opinion to filter out emoji

I've been seeing this on and off on my dash, and it's really sinking though. Though, I have a question, how do you handle foreign language characters? Does it just not read it? What if it's a mixture of Latin characters + non-latin characters?

Some it will take a guess at - extended latin alphabets are like that, and hearing German as pronounced by a confused English computer is hilarious Completely different character sets, like Hebrew and Arabic, I have other software installed, people without won't hear anything

If there's a mixture of characters, it depends on the software - some won't say anything, some will spell out what characters they can identify and ignore the rest

code switching in a single tweet might be hard then, too?

I don't think many people understand the impact of things like emoji on screen readers, so hope your message is heard by many.

I'm trying to learn how to add captions to photos which I hope helps, but I have wondered - are GIFs accessible? (I can't seem to add meta data, but don't know what, if anything, they're loaded with by default)

Thank you for doing that! Gifs aren't accessible at all on here The best option for photos and gifs is to add the description in plain text after the image instead of relying on alt tags That way people who don't use screen readers but still need the description can see it too

Or people in the boondocks. (Now excuse me while I head over to that 1 corner of my abode & wave my phone around so maybe I can get 3G & the text content of tweets.)