Off-topic: I was surprised to see that journalists are doing Unicode art in articles now, and I don’t think that’s wise. Wouldn’t this confuse a blind reader who is listening to a transcribed version?
say '¯_(ツ)_/¯'
say '¯\_(ツ)_/¯'[edit] And it "says" them exactly the same, regardless of backslash: "macron, (unintelligible)letter two underscore slash, macron".
What is says is actually this: ¯ツ_/¯
I don't know how else to run it :)
But you guessed it. I have 4 voices, Samantha/Victoria/Alex/Fred. I was using Alex. Samantha behaves as you say, all others behave as I say. (Strangely enough, now it says "Samantha (downloading)", so maybe after download it will be 'fixed'?)
edit: Ah, I see your response to someone else. I'm going to try Allison.
edit: Ha! It is Allison! "Shrug". What a time to be alive!
For the shruggie I get "macron backslash underscore japanese in a different voice slash macron," which sucks. Too bad - I was hoping it would be recognized as a word.
I'd expect a screen reader to handle ":-)", and given that Slack has had /shrug for years, I am curious if screen readers also know how to pronounce the shrug yet.
(Is Slack screen-reader-accessible?)
There are ways to add emojis in an accessible fashion. You'd have to treat them like images and add alt text or some aria attributes to ensure the screen-reader interprets it correctly. Or, use predefined Unicode verisons.
Neither was done here and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for not even making an effort.
Markdown is not friendly to the shrug.
Emojis have been around long enough that they ought to be handling them by now anyway.
For a seeing person, there is negligible difference between "¯_(ツ)_/¯" and "¯\_(ツ)_/¯".
For either a seeing or blind person there is negligible difference between "emoji" and "meoji".
We can all make up emojis on the spot that can only heuristically be decrypted by seeing them as an image, not reading them one character at a time.
Making up a new word is still just a sequence of characters, and can be understood by any medium, whether it's written, braille, audio, etc.
There's no reasonable way to transcript emojis other than a predefined database of them, which unicode already has.
And transcription services should certainly recognize "¯_(ツ)_/¯" as a failed attempt at "¯\_(ツ)_/¯". Screen readers probably should too.
If they are sticking to whatever Unicode blesses they aren't serving their users well.
Also, I read provost as talking about the art in general, including a correct shrug, so I replied in that context instead of spending time on the missing \.
Being more adaptive than that requires offloading the responsibility of readability to the writers. If I write a blog post featuring a unique ascii emoji I made up, I can't expect a third party to handle that for blind patrons, regardless if it's a transcription service or unicode.
Nevertheless, I'm very satisfied that they're using emoticons and not emoji.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
"Kao" is the japanese word for "face" and "moji" is "character".
That said, I don't think there's a "correct term" yet for these things. That's just what some people call them.