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   skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him (skye@toot.cat)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 19:07:50 JST skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him

   hey #blind peeps, can we talk about those custom emoji for a sec?

   so i've heard that currently they are not accessible because a #screenreader or braille display would only read the name between the two colons, which is frequently optimised for legth because of mastodon's character limit, rather than legibility.

   so what would be the optimal way to deal with them? asking in the sense of: ignore the current constraints of the feature.

   should there simply be slightly more descriptive names that are read every time? can y'all even figure out what a "blobcat" is? (not because i think you can't but because being a non native speaker myself, i think i might have some problems with that if i had no visual clues to go on)

   or should there be a more lengthy description, maybe stored in an image alt attribute, that is read out each time? which is maybe much more annoying? or read the lengthy description out once but the short name for any repetitions?

   what would be the best way to handle it? #accessibility

   (RT yes please :boost_ok:)

   • Embed this notice
     skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him (skye@toot.cat)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 19:07:46 JST skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him

     in reply to

     • Erik

     please RT this one! looking for opinions of #blind people on #accessibility of custom emoji for #screenreader and #braille. also interested in opinions of other people who would use text descriptions of emoji.

     we can't change the way that unicode emoji are handled, but expanding on @bright_helpings's initial suggestion, i am seeing a real chance here to make them not only _as_ accessible as unicode emoji, but _more_ accessible.

     before i take this to the authorities, i would like to know what y'all think of this proposal:

     we give each emoji 2 attributes. one is the short fixed name that is already being used and displayed or read in place of the emoji. the other would be a longer editable description, possibly stored as image alt attribute, though there are maybe other ways to implement it. because of the use case, a tight character limit would be either strictly enforced or throw a warning when it is exceeded. based on the size of braille displays, maybe 20 characters for the short name and 40 for the long description. i am not sure of the precise numbers, what would you like?

     on the server admin side, we offer a way to easily change both of these attributes. this allows for free optimisation and also translation to the server's main language.

     but to improve upon unicode, we additionally give users the ability to edit the long description for each separate use of each emoji, so they can describe their intent in context rather than offering only a context-removed description of the image. this helps blind people as much as autistics and people unfamiliar with the use of emoji.

     for use of screenreaders and braille, we offer a global setting to choose between skipping custom emoji entirely, reading the fixed short name, or reading the editable long description.

     for sighted users, we offer a global setting to remove all custom emoji, or replace them with either the fixed short name or the editable long description.

     edit: i just realised that these two are the same setting rather than 2 different ones.

     we also show the long description on hovering (desktop) or tapping (mobile) the emoji.

     what does everyone think about this proposal?

   • Embed this notice
     skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him (skye@toot.cat)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 19:07:47 JST skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him

     in reply to

     i'm not involved with any development but i have been talking to my server admin who had some ideas and questions, and i'm gonna do my best to bring any conclusions from this conversation to places where they might get seen, though anyone who is more involved in development of any fedi tools is welcome to do do that proactively

     pettter repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him (skye@toot.cat)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Jun-2023 19:07:49 JST skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him

     in reply to

     regarding the language issue, i really don't see how we could reasonably tackle that one, apart from letting server admins edit names wore easily so they could at least customise it to their server language