Opening of the first modules a new Gemini station

[Jason McBrayer]

Frank Jüdes writes:
> The first version of Unicode was published in 1991, 30 years ago! The
> first Emoji symbols were included in 2010, 11 years ago, that should
> have been enough time for screen-readers or terminal-clients to
> implement an adequate handling. Every Unicode character is registered
> in the Unicode Database with a formal name and a description, which
> could be used by a screen-reader to say something like »Pictogram of a
> DUCK«. I am not experienced with screen-readers or braille terminals,
> but how would those deal with for example fractions ½ ¼ ¾ ?

My understanding is that screen readers *do* handle things like emoji
and mathematical characters, but it's annoying. Having a link text be
"ROCKET EMOJI My new capsule" is not bad, but consider a bunch of emojis
in a row, being read out to you by name, probably sped up 3x... Then
it's worse with aesthetic text, because something like "ℌ𝔬𝔲𝔰𝔢 𝔬𝔣
𝔐𝔶𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔶" doesn't become "House of Mystery" or "Fraktur text: House of
Mystery", it becomes "MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL H MATHEMATICAL
FRAKTUR SMALL O MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR SMALL U MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR SMALL
S...." and so on.  This is, arguably, a defect in current screen
readers, but it's also a misuse of Unicode characters for styling.

And if the screen readers adapted to that use of Unicode, what would
they make of "ಠ_ಠ"? Should they be prepared to read it as "Look of
Disapproval" rather than "KANNADA LETTER TTHA SPACING UNDERSCORE KANNADA
LETTER TTHA"? What about "(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻"?

I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like to be able to use these things
too, but when people who use screen readers say they're annoying, I
listen to them. (This is based on what I've heard on the Fediverse; if
I'm wrong about what screen readers do, I'm open to being corrected.)

One option is to wrap studlytext or kaomoji in a preformatted block with
an alt text. That way, screen readers can skip over them if the client
is configured correctly. That means you can't use them inline, but
that's better than nothing.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray@carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”
                    | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow