NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

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

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


y'know, it's farcical that the unicode math/cursive text people use on Twitter and the like is not a solved problem for screen readers from trillion dollar companies. It was farcical ten years ago too.

that's 52 letters at most for those examples, each of them announce all the unicode description including the letter. The Machine is perfectly able to be made to know that it's that letter, it's in the name, it can be picked up with probably one search pattern per character set. You could have a feedback form where people just give you the set of unicode text they saw someone use and hardcode that too. it's not like there's a huge chunk of them people use.

"math people might use them" math people use the block letters, and even those probably should just be parsed as their letter if it's in a word. I get that screen readers right now use some black box ML magic but you can... use the lookup table before you send the data.

Update: so, I checked and the google voices don't do it in Reader Mode, but they do with talkback. So does espeak-ng(? they've got the same names as the espeak voices) voices through firefox's tts via readaloud. They just pronounce them as words, at least when it's reading a Firefox window. Which fonts break which readers? is it a browser thing?

these still break on block/circle text, but it just doesn't render it as a word at all instead of spamming them, which... better and worse I suppose

Found a working windows machine: narrator fails the test
Remembered my ipad was an ipad: voiceover does too

I don't have a mac to test and getting orca/jaws running on my hardware is an issue since I uh. have neither an insert key or a capslock key on any of my machines and iirc they need that for navigation. Narrator does too, but it took me a lot of fighting with it to make it work without the key.

man.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

Yep. It's a shame that Unicode didn't treat the variations (circled, Fraktur, script, etc.) as composed characters like they do with most accents, but it's still basically an if statement to say "withhold the modifier terminology until you can identify words."

I can't even test it on my linux machine because espeak just parses ℯ as e instead of "cursive script italic letter e" or whatever talkback does

the google voices don't even mention it exists as a word anymore. how is espeak better. how is espeak better D:

it should just do an italic voice. if it's cursive it should be girly and excitable, whereas if you're using the gothic bold font it should be like a german accent on a dude with a deep voice

also you say that but my android phone did switch to german for one of the gothic looking ones, like how it has an abrupt and sudden switch to a completely different voice in japanese any time it reads kanji in my text to speech notifications

Weird. My espeak somehow decides to do the worst possible thing, rattling off "letter two-one-zero-eff" Unicode codepoints. Maybe it's a recent improvement? Or relatively recent, since the version it reports is 1.48.15 16.Apr.15, which...either way you read the date, doesn't look good.