Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

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Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/25/2024, 4:39 PM

I dunno about other text to speech engines but android's reads "zhis" just fine because as far as I can tell, it's doing words at the phonetic/syllabic level. Same with "zhat zhing". sure, it pronounces it with slightly more of a Z, but at screader speeds it's not particularly distinguishable

espeak alternates between "z(t)h" and a chinese-sounding "zh", "z(t)hat shing" which is a an issue but still legible at speed

the default one in firefox on linux handles it pretty okay (using voice reader, at least)

Microsoft Zira pronounses them with sh sounds in a way that sounds sort of like a lisp

I can't test others right now but I think people are really underestimating screen readers even if you don't use the text replacement...

I'd love more tests and opinions here, but I don't know how much of an issue this actually is for screaders at this point, and how much is people extrapolating. They're better than they used to be.

if I had to use one that was bad at it, I'd use the text replacement though, since tagging won't actually help with that part.

(I have discovered another reader issue though: many start reading your profile every time someone clicks into a post you wrote. But tab skips it, ofc.)

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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/25/2024, 5:07 PM

I am, a little confused at the idea that 'representing your speech in text' is being met with 'make sure to tag it because it causes reading/parsing issues for me (which is 1. a lot of work (when you consider how many are posting) even if you don't think it is compared to running a text replacement plugin and 2. um, people who viscerally dislike it skim the tags?) and also screen readers'

there's conflicting access needs but one solution is to scroll or use a plugin and the other is to either change the way you're representing speech or... tag every single post with something that makes it searchable.

and with a 'reader, text-replacement plugin makes more sense since, tagging... doesn't work for that, it just hides the post.

there's plenty of other cases that are really bad for screen readers that people don't seem to care about trumpeting, so, like, idk.

would this much kerfuffle be made about other subcultures spelling things differently in ways that trip readers and screaders up? because there's plenty of other stuff, wordplay too, going around that does and gets no thought and is pretty hard to parse unless you look at it phonetically, but doesn't get this treatment.

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