Aral Balkan
It’s quiet something that it’s 2024 and I want to demonstrate making a basic counter web app accessible but I can’t do it on my state of the art Linux machine running today’s Fedora Silverblue because Fedora (and any other Linux distribution that ships with Wayland by default doesn’t have a functional screen reader) and, having just tried it on macOS, I see that VoiceOver reads negative values in text nodes as positive values.
But, hey, at least we have AI, amritie?
Nicolas Bouilleaud
@aral does VO maybe interpret "- 12" has "(dash) twelve", like a list item? Could it be a deliberate decision, to prevent the dash-lists to be read as “minus”?
(Have you tried using U+2212 (minus sign) instead of U+002D (the basic hyphen-minus sign)?)
Aral Balkan
@_nb It’s literally a negative number placed in a JavaScript string via string interpolation. So I’m not manually entering the minus sign. Even the screen reader on Linux reads that much correctly :)
(Where I do use a minus sign in a button in the interface, I use the proper glyph. But this is a bug in either Safari or VoiceOver.)
Aral Balkan
@aardrian const negativeNumber = -1
const html = ‘<div>${negativeNumber}</div’
^ That’s a basic reproduction.
Adrian Roselli
@aral You did not ask, and my Mac is too far away to just go get and make a test case, but did your negative numbers use the minus character (`−` / − / −) or a hyphen / dash?
Asking because I recall dealing with this with a client and I _think_ we resolved with the character. Could also be hopped up on maple syrup.
Aral Balkan
@aardrian Why is there a dollar sign in the output? That’s string interpolation.
Adrian Roselli
@aral For poops and/or giggles:
https://codepen.io/aardrian/pen/yLryobo
NVDA/Firefox, JAWS/Chrome, Orca/Firefox VoiceOver/Safari all announce each div as “dollar [sign] minus one”.
VO was the only one to add “sign”.
It’s also possible I did not code this at all like in your scenario.
Aral Balkan
@aardrian (And thanks so much for checking, by the way) :)
Aral Balkan
@aardrian No worries + thanks again. Yeah, this is a VoiceOver and/or Safari bug. I’m just flummoxed by how such a basic thing can slip through QA at a trillion-dollar corporation.
Adrian Roselli
@aral I put a dollar sign in there because I thought you were doing US currency. Sorry, I mis-read.
I updated the pen and they all still announce with “minus one”.
Aral Balkan
@aardrian Not at all; appreciate your help :)
Adrian Roselli
@aral This would be a VoiceOver bug, then, since Safari only passes the text along. VO makes a decision on whether to call a hyphen character a “minus” on the fly.
Anyway, wasn’t trying to reply-guy your frustration. But if something changed from when I worked on this with my clients then I need to get ahead of it.
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