[HN Gopher] Accessibility: Don't Use Fake Bold or Italic in Soci...
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Accessibility: Don't Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media
Author : rapawel
Score : 33 points
Date : 2025-03-08 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (adrianroselli.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (adrianroselli.com)
| eternityforest wrote:
| Why do the browsers not fix this?
|
| It would be like, five minutes to write a text preprocessor in JS
| to solve this problem,
| treve wrote:
| It's intended behavior. They are mathematical symbols and have
| a different semantic meaning.
| oniony wrote:
| And yet every human that sees them used this way gets it. It
| would not be that hard for the screen reader software to do
| similarly.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Difficulty isn't the problem, as stated. The issue is that
| software doesn't know what "used this way" means - only
| humans do.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Please. You could get good results with basic heuristics,
| without even using AI.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Making assumptions about the semantic intention of characters
| is dangerous (it falls into the category of "cute" behavior of
| software attempting to be helpful). If you do this, the reader
| will attempt to pronounce mathematical formulas like words.
|
| Admittedly this is a common mis-use of these characters, so I'm
| not sure what the _best_ compromise is, but there isn 't an
| _obvious_ compromise (hence the answer to "why don't they fix
| this").
| rerdavies wrote:
| Is it really a common mis-use? I don't think so.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Maybe you could train an LLM to recognize formulas (how else
| are you going to speak a formula coherently?) and treat the
| rest as normalized text.
| Ukv wrote:
| Surprised at how poorly most of the screen readers seem to handle
| it. Will avoid the characters knowing this (not that I used them
| much to begin with), but I do also feel it's something that
| should be fixed on the screen reader side.
|
| Completely understandable to fail at fake improvised fonts (like
| Zzietmubuopsot) made from characters that just happen to look
| similar - but here the characters really are meant to represent
| their ASCII-range counterparts and Unicode defines compatibility
| equivalence/normalization to deal with it. Here the use is fairly
| frivolous, but most such character sets do have legitimate use -
| like fullwidth latin characters for readability when used
| alongside CJK - so really shouldn't just be skipped.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Isn't this by definition not a legitimate use? They are
| mathematical symbols, not linguistic graphemes. Readers could
| dynamically read out the description of every non-letter,
| though that could be more confusing than helpful in some
| situations. They could explicitly add these cases as letters,
| though that would make the reader attempt to read math as
| words. Simply skipping them seems like the worst option,
| though. Legitimate or not, it is _in practice_ a real-world
| usage, so readers should probably account for it, though I can
| 't say I blame them for not doing so. Deciding how to treat
| every block of Unicode case-by-case would be an impossible
| task.
| Ukv wrote:
| > could explicitly add these cases as letters,
|
| Unicode already defines compatibility equivalence[0].
| Normalizing seems like the most sensible default for me -
| then it'd handle this, ks, and so on.
|
| > though that would make the reader attempt to read math as
| words.
|
| For symbols originally intended for mathematical use, it
| probably then makes sense to add a special case to read out
| like T-H-I-S. But I wouldn't say that's strictly necessary -
| even in mathematical expressions you can have variables that
| are words rather than single letters, and either way it's
| definitely better than just skipping it.
|
| [0]: https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Compatibility_Equivale
| nce_...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Call me old fashioned, but maybe if people want to
| communicate "this" they should just type "this" and stop
| trying to be so Internet-quirky.
| Ukv wrote:
| I think that comes back to:
|
| > Here the use is fairly frivolous, but most such
| character sets do have legitimate use - like fullwidth
| latin characters for readability when used alongside CJK
| - so really shouldn't just be skipped.
|
| The use given in the article is quirky - but these are
| real characters with proper uses and shouldn't just be
| skipped.
| layer8 wrote:
| This is not an easy problem. The relevant Unicode Annex #15
| explains:
|
| > The visual appearances of the compatibility equivalent forms
| typically constitute a subset of the expected range of visual
| appearances of the character (or sequence of characters) they
| are equivalent to. However, these variant forms may represent a
| visual distinction that is significant in some textual
| contexts, but not in others. As a result, greater care is
| required to determine when use of a compatibility equivalent is
| appropriate. If the visual distinction is stylistic, then
| markup or styling could be used to represent the formatting
| information. However, some characters with compatibility
| decompositions are used in mathematical notation to represent a
| distinction of a semantic nature; replacing the use of distinct
| character codes by formatting in such contexts may cause
| problems.
|
| In the context of a mathematical text where the semantic
| difference is relevant, you wouldn't want NFK[CD] to be blindly
| applied.
|
| I agree, however, that screen readers shouldn't silently omit
| those characters mid-sentence. At the very least, they should
| say something like "five unsupported characters omitted".
| Ukv wrote:
| To me normalization seems preferable over just skipping the
| text in all situations including math, and it's trivial to
| do, so I think makes for a sensible default. Certainly they
| could then start adding special cases, reading out symbols
| intended for mathematical use like T-H-I-S (though,
| mathematical expressions often still have words).
|
| I'm not sure about "five unsupported characters omitted".
| Would probably need feedback from someone who actually uses a
| screen reader to be sure, but I feel that's less useful than
| normalization. Maybe a tone/voice alteration to indicate
| this? (playing with narrator, it does already change voice
| for control information)
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Have AI write you a browser extension that replaces such
| characters with their regular versions.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I don't know why ppl downvote you (perhaps it's a lazy non-
| contributing response), BUT.. I am using ChatGPT to create my
| own Add-ons for little things/annoyances/improvements on my
| Firefox. They probably won't help anyone else, but it's fun to
| see an idea materialize in 5mins or less!
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The solution here is not to tell people not to write this way,
| it's to tell platforms to do better about giving people
| formatting options for their text
|
| No one would be doing fake bold or italics if people could
| actually just put in real bold and italics
| Zak wrote:
| Both things can be good ideas at the same time.
|
| It's likely the case that large corporate social media
| platforms have thought about what formatting options they want
| to provide and have decided that they will make more money if
| they keep it as it is. Attempts to get them to change that
| aren't somehow connected to their profits are unlikely to
| succeed.
|
| It's possible to convince _people_ to change their behavior by
| appealing to empathy, sympathy, or a sense of justice.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| That ship has sailed, unfortunately. On social media where no
| markup is permitted (or possible), people will use these to stand
| out -- especially those who make money on those platforms (not
| much of a problem on Mastodon though). We, the people who know
| how this works, can explain all we want, but it will always sound
| like a hypothetical edge case, even though this does exclude some
| people from participating.
|
| The only way to stop this would to be to have the platforms where
| this is abused prevent its use (which would harm legitimate use
| too, although that is not nearly as prevalent as the 'I just want
| bold and italic'-case), have those platforms introduce minimal
| markup (not necessarily wanted), or have browsers and screen
| readers support these characters (not trivial, I suspect).
| alistairSH wrote:
| What's the reasoning behind lack of B/I text on social media?
| These are mature platforms, I can't think of a good reason to
| prefer "math symbols as style" over actual B/I characters?
| hughes wrote:
| Isn't a screen reader's job to audibly convey information on the
| screen _as it would be interpreted by a sighted person_?
|
| The original intent of the characters as mathematical symbols is
| obviously irrelevant in the examples. No person reading the posts
| with their eyes is thinking "oh hmm I wonder what is the
| mathematical meaning behind this bolded character".
|
| This seems like an example of a technical implementation that
| misses the point of the value that needs to be delivered to
| humans using the system.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Sighted people can tell the difference between mathematical
| symbols used as letters vs used as math. There are ways to
| solve that problem programmatically, but the point is that it
| is a problem to be solved, not some kind of refusal to do the
| "obviously correct" thing.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| When platforms were more open (ahem, Twitter), there used to be a
| bot you could mention in the replies of offending posts that
| would post a recording demonstrating how bad/inaccessible the
| experience was with the offending content in screen readers. Used
| it a few times to demonstrate on some big tweets, good eye opener
| for ppl abusing math symbols. iirc one was to demonstrate when
| _Wordle_ exploded and everyone was posting those little green and
| yellow emoji squares. Granted, that was not an easy one to solve
| and never really was as the best option, using an image of the
| results, was not easily do-able in the pipeline from game - >
| sharing to social.
|
| What really irks me is social media managers/content
| professionals posting that way on corporate accounts, sports team
| accounts etc, when they should know better, or bein
| accessible/inclusive should be on their radar more as it's been a
| topic of note for a number of years with the rise of ALT text
| considerations etc. Shows their inexperience.
| namuol wrote:
| At this point I wonder if it's time we add a kind of markup
| control scheme to Unicode so we can finally have a standard for
| rich text that is backwards compatible.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| ANSI escape sequences exist, and are good enough for basic
| formatting like bold, italic, underlined etc.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Absolutely no one should stop using bold or italics just because
| screen readers fail to parse. Screen readers need to do better.
|
| Bold and italics add spice to otherwise boring typography.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Screen readers do actual B/I fine. Unless I'm missing
| something, the case here is using math symbols in place of B/I
| where the platform doesn't allow native styling.
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