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108 points liquid99 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.415s | source
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notpushkin ◴[] No.43360319[source]
Like others have already said, it’s an accessibility nightmare. On the other hand, it’s not like this is going away anytime soon – maybe screenreaders could learn to understand and read some such “fonts” (e.g. bold/italic at least)?
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MatthewWilkes ◴[] No.43360462[source]
Absolutely. The argument that screen readers shouldn't gain a heurisric for identifying this kind of text and normalising it down to pronouncable words is just prescribtivism, to my view.

ALL CAPS, SpOnGeBoB cASe, clap emphasis, and others carry specific meanings in colloquial written language, the use of other letterlike symbols can also. These should be presented in an accessible form to the user, rather than demanding that people refrain from using them.

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1. xg15 ◴[] No.43369255[source]
That's true, but at some point, intention and accessibility will start to clash.

Like, there used to be that fad/meme of adding as many diacritics and other Unicode appendages to a text as possible. ("Cursed text" or something I think)

The diacritics will stack and turn the characters into monstrosities that will break the page layout and generally make the text look alien and distorted.

It also makes the text hard to read, which is the entire point.

But a screen reader is kind of at a dilemma here: If it ignores the diacritics and just reads the text normally, then the "weirdness" will be missing and the text will appear out of context. To convey that, the reader would have to intentionally read the text in a distorted voice - but this will make it hard to understand and could lead to unease and confusion if the distortion starts without warning.

There is also the question whether we want unexpected tone shifts at all. Like, it would be semantically correct to read all caps text in a shouting voice, but do we really want screen readers to randomly start shouting?

(Edit: oh right, it was Zalgo, not cursed text)