Aral Balkan
Mathematical italic capital h mathematical italic small e mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small o.
WTF?
Oh, I just said “Hello” to you in italics.
(That’s similar to what someone who uses a screen reader hears when you use fancy non-alphabetical Unicode characters to simulate italics or boldface on your fediverse posts. So please don’t do that.)
Aral Balkan
(The irony is I once made an app called Feathers that let you do that for Twitter/Facebook back in the day when I didn’t know better.) 🙈
Pixelcode 🇺🇦
@odddev @thilo @aral When writing a mathematical expression, you make sure that it's as unambiguous as possible, for example by putting multiplication symbols between variables.
Kai Klostermann
@pixelcode @thilo @aral What happens if a mathematical expression coincidentally reassembles words?
Pixelcode 🇺🇦
@thilo @aral It's not too hard to determine whether a given string of non-Latin characters resembles a word in the post's language. You just need a morphological lexicon and basic understanding of NLP, which anyone who works on screen readers definitely has.
:thilo:
@aral How about also fixing the screen readers? I'm not arguing against not using UTF8 special characters while screen readers can't properly interpret what was written - but since consecutive characters typically form words, why not teach that to screen readers?
Adrian Roselli
@pixelcode
Mathematicians don’t write math that way because not all math uses simple operators like that.
Hence MathML
Either way, it is not a simple NLP problem, it is also about context:
https://adrianroselli.com/2021/10/blaming-screen-readers-red-flag.html
The good news is you can contribute to NVDA (a free, open source screen reader) if you think you have a viable approach.
iBleedIn6Colors
@aral Ι𝚝’𝚜 𝚗о𝚝 𝚝𝚑е ро𝚜𝚝е𝚛𝚜 𝚏а𝚞ⅼ𝚝 і𝚏 𝚜с𝚛ее𝚗 𝚛еаⅾе𝚛𝚜 𝚗ееⅾ 𝚝о bе 𝚏іхеⅾǃ
Aral Balkan
@iBleedIn6Colors It’s the poster’s fault if they know screen readers, for whatever reason, fail at rendering something and they use it anyway because fuck disabled people, amirite?
voxpopsicle
@aral question: what do they hear when you write a11y?
Aral Balkan
@voxpopsicle Damn, you got me! Good one :)
(It’s a terrible acronym but one that’s sadly still used. That’s why I also added the full term in another hashtag.)
Aral Balkan
@yaqub Yes, that is the point of the post.
Yaqub. M
@aral that's quite complex way of communication how about trying "hello"
Sr. Estegosaurio 🦕
@Life_is @aral Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense, I will avoid sing unicode characters in my posts then.
C.Suthorn :prn:
It happens, when you use special chars (code points) to simulate text formating. If you do not use bold formating in a PDF but simulate it with code points of mathematical characters that look like ordinary letters with bold formating it will happen in PDF.
Sr. Estegosaurio 🦕
@aral Does that happens when you use any kind of text formatting?
Like, if a PDF has bold segments or if I use markdown in some fediverse software that supports it?
Aral Balkan
@SrEstegosaurio @Life_is Thanks :)
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