long post on accessibility advice from a blind screen reader user
@Cassana I'd like to share this on a wordpress blog post, how would you like to be linked to or credited please, if at all? Thank you
@Cassana thank you, will do
@Cassana I ended up compiling several posts including yours, I hope that's okay. If you have time I'd appreciate feedback https://tangledbankblog.wordpress.com/2022/11/24/the-future-is-federated-my-first-week-back-on-mastodon/#InclusivityIntersectionality
@afewbugs Hi there. I've skipped to the accessibility bit, but will read the other stuff at some point, which at a glance seemed pretty good starting advice or commentary on the culture here anyway. Here are my thoughts.
1 and 2. yep, all good.
3. Screen readers don't care about what a font looks like, and won't get confused by it when it's just typed text in posts. Though, you do mention mapping. Any font that shows a D when you type a z could be a problem, but I've never seen one such font used that creates gibberish on my end besides Windows 98 attempts at typing Devanagari or Simplified Chinese. When it comes to their image recognition function, then yes, weird fonts in an image may not be recognised and identified correctly, which is where any alt text will help out. Also, with regards weird fonts in posts, although it won't bother screen readers if mapped right, it may cause accessibility issues for low-vision people who may have difficulties deciphering busy or weird fonts.
4. Moderate use, yes. Some screen readers will say "8 smiling face with smiling eyes and rosy cheeks" instead of reading that 8 times, but yes, moderating usage will help most.
I hope that's helpful.
@Cassana that's awesome and really helpful thank you! I'll update this evening or tomorrow. I really appreciate your time.
@afewbugs No problem, always happy to help.
@jmorahan @afewbugs As long as the diacritics are purely ornamental and part of the standard mapping it should be fine. So a Z could look like Z̵̄̆̀̈, but if those diacritics aren't actually there, the screen reader will just see z. I'm going to extend the topic for the fun of it, but 𐌳 or 𐌃 won't be read out, because the screen reader has no clue how to pronounce Gothic letter dags or Old Itallic D, yet I can spell them fine. Basically, screen readers don't get confused quickly, they may just not know how to pronounce something dependent on the set language.
@afewbugs I'm completely fine with you sharing, but I would like to remain unnamed in the wider online world. As you can probably guess, it's still somewhat crazy in my notifications, so if you could perhaps write a draft post with my content in it and then send it to me in DM to OK, that would be super helpful.