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Comment by cmg | Hacker News Reader

The author says "(Maybe it does cause a problem, but it wouldn’t have to.)" and this feels extremely dismissive of people who actually rely on screenreaders today.

I had Safari/VoiceOver speak this tweet [0] (no offense to the author, it was just the first one in my feed that had this style of character in it). Every letter is some form of "Mathematical bold script capital s"

In that particular tweet, not only does it not read the word, but the "i" character is "Mathematical bold script small 1"

[0] https://twitter.com/kiwapebretech/status/1420613820876271617

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This does feel like a screen reader bug though. I would expect software like that to be advanced enough to know from "context" (twitter.com) that it's probably not reading mathematical formulas.

I don't think it's dismissive at all (let alone extremely) to say "this might cause a problem [and by extension, if this is important, do more research], but it shouldn't." It's pointing out an area where screen readers fall short unnecessarily.

It's not that it might be a problem - it is a real-world accessibility problem for people who use screenreaders.

Should the software be able to detect context? Sure. But that's not where we are today and to withhold content from people because their software hasn't gotten that far just seems wrong.

It's an interesting exercise in seeing what we can do with various Unicode characters, for sure. The 'disclaimers' presented could be worded a bit more strongly, as in "This will as of 2021 cause problems for people using screenreaders, so it's not recommended to use it."

I don’t understand, the screen reader is doing the correct thing. People tweet math, code, all sorts of things that aren’t prose formatted with hacky unintended use of unicode. Maybe some form of AI could detect that, but I wouldn’t bet accessibility on it.

The real issue is that there’s a general use case for basic formatting of real prose, and perhaps unicode should accommodate that. But expecting screen readers to understand these kinds of workarounds is unrealistic, and expecting it despite knowing it isn’t supported is user hostile.

This prioritizes the wrong thing. If a nice formatting technique excludes people who use screen readers from perceiving the content correctly, and you are aware of this, then using those characters is dismissive, not just extremely but completely.

Pointing the blame at the screen reader software absolves the decision maker for a choice that they themselves control.

It's also really handwavy to say that in context screen readers should know to announce something different than the actual characters being used. What if I want to tweet an actual math formula, for example? How can that be solved for?

It's a hack, and it doesn't work in screenreaders because hacks are often not robust when context changes, otherwise they wouldn't be hacks, they'd just be "the way".

I see, that's good to know. Thanks for digging into this.

I used the Microsoft Edge Immersive Reader/Speak aloud and it just skips over these characters.

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