𝙿𝚎𝚘𝚙𝚕𝚎 𝚍𝚘𝚗'𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚝𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝔰𝔭𝔢𝔠𝔦𝔞𝔩 𝔣𝔬𝔫𝔱𝔰. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘦.
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Replying to @benwikler
People don’t realize that using symbols from Unicode’s Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block as if they were letters totally hoses blind people who use screen readers. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/mathematical_alphanumeric_symbols/list.htm … Screen readers read text aloud to blind folks—but those symbols break screen readers.
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Unicode has a standard algorithm to strip all this nonsense away and turn it into simple text: it's called normalization. If screen readers aren't doing that then that's a bug in screen readers. I'm all for accessibility, but this is a solved problem.pic.twitter.com/0PfcEjKLmR
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These symbols are for math rather than words. “Unicode expressly recommends that these characters not be used in general text as a substitute for presentational markup; the letters are specifically designed to be semantically different from each other.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols …
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Sure, but Unicode recommendations aren't going to stop people from tweeting in italics. It's up to *developers* to follow Unicode recs first and foremost, and for a screen reader that means implementing normalization. Which is like one line of code since libraries do it for you.
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In fairness, the Unicode recommendation is that these symbols are expressly to be used for math. So in the grand scheme of things, I can’t entirely fault screen-reader companies for not having this at the top of their priority list.
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Sure, but normalization solves a lot of other Unicode-related problems for screen readers too. It's just a good idea all around for a use case like that.
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Replying to @marcan42
I think normalizing is a pretty good idea in general. Though for these characters, I probably wouldn’t want to normalize them since in math an italic “A” can have a different meaning from a roman letter “A”. And if they were normalized, that could make math a lossy prospect.
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Screen readers are pretty much a lossy prospect already; you wouldn't want to normalize gratuitously, of course. Properly implementing math in a screen reader (in a non-lossy way) is a much bigger challenge!
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Replying to @marcan42 @FriendlyAshley
if there were a way to tag things as math in a way the screen reader would recognize, that would work (but that requires standardization of course)
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