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Comment by schmichael | Hacker News Reader

At the very end in a parenthetical the author includes:

> (NB - alt text is really important for visually impaired users. Please don't needlessly clutter their timeline with garbage.)

What is the impact on screen readers? Do visually impaired users have to suffer through 1000 base64 characters being read aloud?

At the very least it seems like this warning should be at the top of the article with a disclaimer to only use this method for good reasons (eg after recovering your Twitter account post-hack or as a one-time proof of identity).

Please don't use this and end up discouraging software and services from properly supporting accessibility features!

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You're of course correct but I also think you greatly overestimate the number of people willing to even put up with PGP, let alone sign their tweets with it.

I think a screen reader user would probably just skip to the next element once they figured out it was gibberish. It might be nice to add a line before the PGP header explaining what was going on, though.

> It might be nice to add a line before the PGP header explaining what was going on, though.

Maybe something like ...

  -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

This?

If the proposal is to use this for general purpose tweeting then you need to assume the audience does not know what a pgp signature is.

> Do visually impaired users have to suffer through 1000 base64 characters being read aloud?

Yeah, but they'll use the keyboard to navigate to the next paragraph after a few characters - or the next the tweet entirely.

While I agree with you, detecting garbage text and not reading it out without explicit request sounds like a feature that screenreaders should have.

Better yet a PGP aware screen reader could actually check the signature and then simply mention that "This message was verified against the authors signature" or similar.

I expect those who'd actually want such a feature would have a workaround in place already.

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