Many thanks to everyone who replied to my post yesterday asking: Folks using screen readers: How annoying is it to come across posts with a lot of emojis?
I got so many helpful replies that I've summarized what I learned into the following post, which took every character my instance allows for posts!
Yesterday's post is here, if you want to reference and see the individual replies.
https://sfba.social/@jeridansky/114971894672483573
Please, for the sake of folks using screen readers:
Add decent alt text to your images. You don’t need an elaborate description, but something as minimal as “dog” isn’t kind.
Don’t overdo the emojis. These have alt text associated with them, but it gets tiresome to hear (rather than see) a string of them. Some are worse than others; hearing “red heart” repeatedly isn’t as bad as hearing “smiling face with smiling eyes.” Emojis at the end of a post are the best, as they are easier to skip over.
Don’t use emoticons at all; a screen reader can’t make any sense of them.
Remember that ascii art is largely inaccesssible, too. Listen to how sign bunny and some others are heard: https://adrianroselli.com/2021/10/blaming-screen-readers-red-flag.html#Handle
Don’t use unicode mathematical symbols in your display name or posts to create bold, italic or script letters. Think of the poor person hearing something like this: “Mathematical symbol italicized s, Mathematical symbol italicized c”, etc. (Alternatively, the characters may not be read at all.)
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