Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Visually impaired web developers - your experience with Unicode characters in CSS (self.Blind)
submitted by punkter_peter
Hello.
I'm aware it's a long shot but I'll give it a try. One of the points I'm trying to make for an article I'm working on is the accessibility of Unicode characters in CSS code. This is where I need to hear from visually impaired web developers: what are your struggles in this area and how do you cope with them?
Feel free to reply either here or over DM. If you don't have the answers but know certain users or subreddits I can turn to for help, it's just as helpful.
Thanks.
I'm aware it's a long shot but I'll give it a try. One of the points I'm trying to make for an article I'm working on is the accessibility of Unicode characters in CSS code. This is where I need to hear from visually impaired web developers: what are your struggles in this area and how do you cope with them?
Feel free to reply either here or over DM. If you don't have the answers but know certain users or subreddits I can turn to for help, it's just as helpful.
Thanks.
fastfinge 2 points 5y ago
I'm trying to understand why Unicode characters in CSS would pose any more of a challenge than anywhere else? As long as the screen reader can identify them, they would be fine.
punkter_peter [OP] 1 points 5y ago
Let's take for example class names. We're taught that CSS class names should be (at least) made out of letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens and that these names should have some kind of meaning. What happens when the class name is "█" or "😀"? Can screen reader reads these properly? Can visually impaired developer type out these class names easily?
fastfinge 2 points 5y ago
Well, on Windows 10, the Emoji keyboard would work to type them. And the most recent versions of screen readers can read them. I don't think this is any worse of a problem than class names written in Russian, Korean, or Chinese. Similar to how sighted people would need to install extra fonts and keyboards to read and write them, blind developers would need to install different screen reader voices to work with them.
Amonwilde 3 points 5y ago
Also, in my experience, this is extremely rare. People usually use base ASCII stuff and not crazy unicode characters for classes.
fastfinge 1 points 5y ago
In English, yes. I've read some CSS from people who's native language is not English, and they do tend to write class names in that language, even if it requires unicode. So it is a thing that happens sometimes. No idea why anyone would name CSS classes with emoji though.
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