Completely understandable to fail at fake improvised fonts (like ꓄ꃅꀤꌗ) made from characters that just happen to look similar - but here the characters really are meant to represent their ASCII-range counterparts and Unicode defines compatibility equivalence/normalization to deal with it. Here the use is fairly frivolous, but most such character sets do have legitimate use - like fullwidth latin characters for readability when used alongside CJK - so really shouldn't just be skipped.
Unicode already defines compatibility equivalence[0]. Normalizing seems like the most sensible default for me - then it'd handle ｔｈｉｓ, ᵗʰⁱˢ, and so on.
> though that would make the reader attempt to read math as words.
For symbols originally intended for mathematical use, it probably then makes sense to add a special case to read out like T-H-I-S. But I wouldn't say that's strictly necessary - even in mathematical expressions you can have variables that are words rather than single letters, and either way it's definitely better than just skipping it.
[0]: https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Compatibility_Equivalence_...
> Here the use is fairly frivolous, but most such character sets do have legitimate use - like fullwidth latin characters for readability when used alongside CJK - so really shouldn't just be skipped.
The use given in the article is quirky - but these are real characters with proper uses and shouldn't just be skipped.
> The visual appearances of the compatibility equivalent forms typically constitute a subset of the expected range of visual appearances of the character (or sequence of characters) they are equivalent to. However, these variant forms may represent a visual distinction that is significant in some textual contexts, but not in others. As a result, greater care is required to determine when use of a compatibility equivalent is appropriate. If the visual distinction is stylistic, then markup or styling could be used to represent the formatting information. However, some characters with compatibility decompositions are used in mathematical notation to represent a distinction of a semantic nature; replacing the use of distinct character codes by formatting in such contexts may cause problems.
In the context of a mathematical text where the semantic difference is relevant, you wouldn’t want NFK[CD] to be blindly applied.
I agree, however, that screen readers shouldn’t silently omit those characters mid-sentence. At the very least, they should say something like “five unsupported characters omitted”.
I'm not sure about "five unsupported characters omitted". Would probably need feedback from someone who actually uses a screen reader to be sure, but I feel that's less useful than normalization. Maybe a tone/voice alteration to indicate this? (playing with narrator, it does already change voice for control information)
No one would be doing fake bold or italics if people could actually just put in real bold and italics
It's likely the case that large corporate social media platforms have thought about what formatting options they want to provide and have decided that they will make more money if they keep it as it is. Attempts to get them to change that aren't somehow connected to their profits are unlikely to succeed.
It's possible to convince people to change their behavior by appealing to empathy, sympathy, or a sense of justice.
To me this seems unintended, rather than some thoughtful, considered optimum.
The only way to stop this would to be to have the platforms where this is abused prevent its use (which would harm legitimate use too, although that is not nearly as prevalent as the 'I just want bold and italic'-case), have those platforms introduce minimal markup (not necessarily wanted), or have browsers and screen readers support these characters (not trivial, I suspect).
Putting text in asterisks for example, will render it in italics.
There's no reason why the various SM platforms can't do this.
Thankfully, the other root comments here have all of the alternative suggestions. The theme of which is Don't blame the author because the [accessibility] tool is broken. So I hope you can forgive me for not enumerating them again.
But I still want to take the alternative stance and assert you should use unicode in a previously novel way. Worry more about how you want to express yourself, and less about being well understood by everyone. Does being fancy here mean that it will be harder for some people to process and understand your message? Yes! But if that's a good thing or a bad thing should be reserved, exclusively for you to decide.
The author chooses to restrict information, the site they used to generate the text. Because you can't be trusted to take their advice. And the chance that the person reading your text might be visually impaired, and the screen reader they use might choke on that text, is more important than what you want, or how you want to express yourself.
I reject this idea.
I wonder how they'd feel about upsidedown text, in an attempt to artistically convey the author's state of mind where they themselves feel upsidedown.
I do agree with the author on the point that you should make any messages you wish to convey, as easy as possible for any one to receive them. But never at the expense of the message, or the art you choose to give your ideas. There are people who will never be able to understand you, and there will be people who choose to misunderstand you. And there will be people who tell you how you must express yourself, and it's seemingly always to make them more comfortable. Sometimes it's ok to ignore them, and sometimes that's even the responsible thing to do.
Yes, most accessibility software sucks.
However, translating intent is harder than translating text. It is not always reasonable to transliterate, and knowing when you should is effectively undecideable.
Most accessibility software is more concerned with stability, and the huge number of devices that they need to work with. If your keyboard suddenly decided to be a T9 with autocorrect on everything you interact with, it would likely result in anger.
I am not simply reading your information in a different way. The intent of the information is also conveyed in another way. I don't know if it's a link, unless you tell me. I cannot tell if you're using Greek symbols for a mathematic equation or for typesetting, until you tell me.
Use the standards. It works for both of us, and is less work.
Not entirely sure why you think the assertion of your own opinion over the supposed assertion of another's is any better by the way.
I don't think my opinion is better. I'm disagreeing with the take that it's never a good idea to do something fancy. I think the assertion the article makes, which from my read can be reduced to:
> you're wrong if you care about fancy text more than you care about screen readers
Is problematic because, generously it's too simplistic. The author feels empowered to tell others they're wrong. So I want to do the same; because using things in weird ways they were never expected is the hacker ethos. And I think the world would be improved by more people coming up with more fun things, or doing things just because they're cool. We need fewer people who tell others they're wrong for doing something fun, and more people who do things because they're fun.
In other words; because this problem can be fixed by improving screen readers, we shouldn't fix it by reducing the amount of cool shit people can do.
> This will be a shocker I'm sure, but I think the demonstration [...] to this issue, and may not be aware.
I'm not shocked, I simply don't agree. The author was able to write it as a suggestion, and make the argument using "should" but chose to assert it as an affirmative responsibility.
Not what I was suggesting either. I was talking about your assertion of it. To be more explicit, what you're doing is
> The author feels empowered to tell others they're wrong. So I want to do the same;
a tit-for-tat. If you claim that asserting a preference or an opinion is wrong (which I'd agree with), you were then at fault for doing the exact same thing. And just like the author, you merely felt justified to act that way, and would have been able to make do otherwise, but chose not to.
I'm not arguing for tit-for-tat. I think it's dumb. I took the affirmative stance I did, only to match the tone of the article. Adding the same absurdity to the counter point. I think we're both equally wrong for taking an unnuanced stance. The author and I both took stances that exclude important nuance. I was partially hoping partially expecting the remainder of what I said would come across. That idea being, options are better, warnings are better, absolutes are problematic.
> The author feels empowered to tell others they're wrong. So I want to do the same;
It would have been better for me to say "So I guess I'm required to do the same here". I'd much rather just suggest options, you can tell because I said as much
> But if that's a good thing or a bad thing should be reserved, exclusively for you to decide.
I don't want to make your decisions for you. Some of the authors points are compelling, I don't want anyone to die because they missed the tsunami warning either. But I find their specific arguments here needlessly restrictive. They're not warning, or reminding. They're saying your social media posts are wrong if you don't do it this way, and accusing the author of being irresponsible. Something *do* need to be easily readable, but that important nuance wasn't included in the article, just like I didn't include how tsunami warning without a doubt, need to be as accessible as possible.
The comment is so ridiculously wrong I don't know where to start. Please, feed the comment to ChatGPT and ask it to explain to you how things work.
Target had to pay $6,000,000 because of accessibility problems with its web site.
I sure hope you're not in a position to make decisions about your company's web site.
I appreciate in your haste to be mad about something, you helped me prove my point.
I was talking about places where you'd reasonably prefer artistic expression, not large corporate websites. Given different circumstances, I would make different decisions.
However, HTML does not.
Though, in my experience, getting Chrome to adopt something new, is easier than getting Dragon to fix a bug.
The original intent of the characters as mathematical symbols is obviously irrelevant in the examples. No person reading the posts with their eyes is thinking "oh hmm I wonder what is the mathematical meaning behind this bolded character".
This seems like an example of a technical implementation that misses the point of the value that needs to be delivered to humans using the system.
So until that happens, another option is for people to just... not engage in Unicode abuse like this. Or at least be mindful of the fact that if they do, screen readers will take a massive shit, so if that's not their goal, they should reconsider. Which is what the post is all about (as well a general plea to folks to at least mull it over twice if it is their goal).
"Existed for decades" sure, but some design bugs persist for centuries, that's not enough to be confident a fix is very hard
What really irks me is social media managers/content professionals posting that way on corporate accounts, sports team accounts etc, when they should know better, or bein accessible/inclusive should be on their radar more as it's been a topic of note for a number of years with the rise of ALT text considerations etc. Shows their inexperience.
Bold and italics add spice to otherwise boring typography.
It would be like, five minutes to write a text preprocessor in JS to solve this problem,
Admittedly this is a common mis-use of these characters, so I'm not sure what the best compromise is, but there isn't an obvious compromise (hence the answer to "why don't they fix this").
The relevant parties involved are the websites hosting the content, the people producing the content, and the developers developing the screen readers (and potentially the admins who control the screen reader application that is deployed). None of these are the browser.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a document where I'd want in read as anything but normal Italic text, the only time I ever see typeset math is PDF datasheets.