Conversation

Notices

1. Devin Prater (devinprater@tweesecake.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Feb-2023 22:53:37 JST Devin Prater

   Ugh my gosh I can’t wait till Mastodon at least supports freaking Markdown so people can stop using mathematical latin italic capital u mathematical Latin italic lowercase n Mathematical Latin italic lowercase i Mathematical Latin italic lowercase c Mathematical Latin italic lowercase o Mathematical Latin italic lowercase d Mathematical Latin italic lowercase e Mathematical Latin italic lowercase t Mathematical Latin italic lowercase e Mathematical Latin italic lowercase x Mathematical Latin italic lowercase t.
   Yeah. You feel that? The need to concentrate and pick out each individual letter and then reconstruct the word? That’s how I feel whenever I hear that in a username or post. You know what I do when I hear that? I skip it. Social media simply needs formatting tools. At least italics, bold, and underline. At least then screen reader will just read the post. Oh it won’t speak the formatting unless forced to cause blind people don’t need to know formatting /s but it’ll be bearable to listen to.

   • Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Polyna 🇪🇺 (polyna@toot.community)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 02:48:28 JST Polyna 🇪🇺

     in reply to

     • Nicolas Bouilleaud

     @_nb @devinprater Nah, most screen readers are kinda terrible. Do you know that CSS supports an “aural” media type and whole bunch of aural stylesheet properties? To my knowledge, apparently *no* screen reader supports any of these. Shameful.

     https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html

   • Nicolas Bouilleaud (_nb@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 02:48:38 JST Nicolas Bouilleaud

     in reply to

     @devinprater oh wow, I kinda assumed screen reader were more powerful than what they seem to be. I played a fair bit with voiceover when ai was an iOS developer and I knew about the macintalk emph thing, I thought screen reader automatically switched tone when reading, for example “something between quote marks”.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Devin Prater (devinprater@tweesecake.social)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 02:48:40 JST Devin Prater

     in reply to

     • Nicolas Bouilleaud

     @_nb This *is* a very good, and even helpful, solution to the problem. I mean just about no screen reader supports using an emphasis tone, besides Narrator when the option is selected, JAWS when the speech and sound schemes are set up how the user wants them, which takes a good 15 minutes if the user is familiar with that system, and possibly Apple stuff if the errors generated by Console for VoiceOver meals they’re working on a MacinTalk Emph thing. But yeah that would be great.

   • Nicolas Bouilleaud (_nb@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 02:48:41 JST Nicolas Bouilleaud

     in reply to

     @devinprater I wonder if screen readers could handle it on their own. “That line of mathematical italic letters really doesn’t look like math at all, let’s use the emphasis voice tone and read it as words”.

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 02:49:58 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     • Polyna 🇪🇺
     • Nicolas Bouilleaud

     @polyna @_nb @devinprater I've implemented this spec!

     Really highlights a weird dichotomy in the speech-synthesis space: You can either have natural sounding voices or expressive voices. I'd love for someone to figure out how to achieve both simultaneously!

   • Kir Axanov (axkira@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Mar-2023 11:33:07 JST Kir Axanov

     in reply to

     @devinprater
     Got a proposal.
     Use blocks with intended md syntax:
     ```md
     Text in markdown
     ```
     When I save msg server parses this block and saves a plain text version alongside with src in md.
     If the client cannot print md - it uses plain text (screen readers too).
     In setrings I can choose to use / see md or not. By default - use plain text.
     This way we can use not only md syntax btw. Also can use different syntaxes in one msg.

     How mad is it?

     Sorry in advance, haven't read whole thread.