[provost]

> The details are a bit sketchy. Ask "how many thousands," and you're told, ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Off-topic: I was surprised to see that journalists are doing Unicode art in articles now, and I don’t think that’s wise. Wouldn’t this confuse a blind reader who is listening to a transcribed version?

[garblegarble]

I was impressed to discover that on macOS, asking it to speak '¯\_(ツ)_/¯' results in it saying "shrug". The exact form from the article without the backslash for the left arm, though, results in it saying "comma" for some (very) strange reason. For example:

  say '¯_(ツ)_/¯'
  say '¯\_(ツ)_/¯'

[steve_adams_86]

Is this a joke? I just ran it and got something like "macron colo-con letter to underscore macron" And that's... The best I can interpret, it's very muddled.

edit: Ah, I see your response to someone else. I'm going to try Allison.

edit: Ha! It is Allison! "Shrug". What a time to be alive!

[virgilp]

Nope - neither of them say "shrug" on my laptop. High Sierra/ 10.13.2

[edit] And it "says" them exactly the same, regardless of backslash: "macron, (unintelligible)letter two underscore slash, macron".

What is says is actually this: ¯ツ_/¯

[garblegarble]

Strange, I'm on 10.13.3... have you tried running the say commands at the command-line? My speech settings are set to "Allison", so perhaps it's a feature of the advanced voices?

[virgilp]

> have you tried running the say commands at the command-line

I don't know how else to run it :)

But you guessed it. I have 4 voices, Samantha/Victoria/Alex/Fred. I was using Alex. Samantha behaves as you say, all others behave as I say. (Strangely enough, now it says "Samantha (downloading)", so maybe after download it will be 'fixed'?)

[JackC]

It's fun to try stuff like this. In iOS for example you can go to Settings - General - Accessibility - VoiceOver to try the screen reader experience.

For the shruggie I get "macron backslash underscore japanese in a different voice slash macron," which sucks. Too bad - I was hoping it would be recognized as a word.

[robin_reala]

The Japanese pronunciation is ‘tsu’, it’s from the katakana alphabet.

[detaro]

Yes it would (if not correctly marked up), but caring about that isn't exactly widespread in the web world in general.

[geofft]

Wouldn't the same thing happen with ":-)", which is likely to appear (and be relevant) in quotations if nothing else?

I'd expect a screen reader to handle ":-)", and given that Slack has had /shrug for years, I am curious if screen readers also know how to pronounce the shrug yet.

(Is Slack screen-reader-accessible?)

[criddell]

I think when you include the context of the article around that sentence, the meaning should be clear.

[alistairSH]

Looks at the source, in this instance, the emoji is not accessible. It's text in the paragraph, just like the actually words. The author is relying on tools like Jaws/NVDA correctly translating a graphic into spoken word.

There are ways to add emojis in an accessible fashion. You'd have to treat them like images and add alt text or some aria attributes to ensure the screen-reader interprets it correctly. Or, use predefined Unicode verisons.

Neither was done here and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for not even making an effort.

[pault]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[buro9]

Their article format is Markdown, and if you enter the full shrug as Markdown then the back slash escapes the underscore to prevent it becoming markup, but it is removed in the process.

Markdown is not friendly to the shrug.

[pault]

I was trying to make a joke about the journalist not caring about screen readers. Also, the correct way to shrug in markdown is ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ (verified in github and gitlab).

[maxerickson]

I think it is reasonable to expect a transcription service or screen reader to treat "¯_(ツ)_/¯" like it treats any other word.

Emojis have been around long enough that they ought to be handling them by now anyway.

[croon]

> I think it is reasonable to expect a transcription service or screen reader to treat "¯_(ツ)_/¯" like it treats any other word.

For a seeing person, there is negligible difference between "¯_(ツ)_/¯" and "¯\_(ツ)_/¯".

For either a seeing or blind person there is negligible difference between "emoji" and "meoji".

We can all make up emojis on the spot that can only heuristically be decrypted by seeing them as an image, not reading them one character at a time.

Making up a new word is still just a sequence of characters, and can be understood by any medium, whether it's written, braille, audio, etc.

There's no reasonable way to transcript emojis other than a predefined database of them, which unicode already has.

[wahnfrieden]

Unicode language prescriptivism... that’s a new one.

[croon]

That's not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting that the proposed solution would be nothing more than doing the same thing again, but as a transcription service. Unicode updates with new emojis too.

Being more adaptive than that requires offloading the responsibility of readability to the writers. If I write a blog post featuring a unique ascii emoji I made up, I can't expect a third party to handle that for blind patrons, regardless if it's a transcription service or unicode.

[maxerickson]

Yes, my point is that a transcription service or screen reader will be well served by having a database containing symbol sequences like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯".

And transcription services should certainly recognize "¯_(ツ)_/¯" as a failed attempt at "¯\_(ツ)_/¯". Screen readers probably should too.

If they are sticking to whatever Unicode blesses they aren't serving their users well.

Also, I read provost as talking about the art in general, including a correct shrug, so I replied in that context instead of spending time on the missing \.

[fiatjaf]

There should be an "alt" attribute that specifies to the transcriber what the face means.

Nevertheless, I'm very satisfied that they're using emoticons and not emoji.

[pault]

I think that's what aria-label[1] does. Also, I believe the correct term of art is "kamoji"[2]. Emoticons are faces constructed from ascii characters.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

[2] http://kaomoji.ru/en/

[wccrawford]

Spelling correction: Kaomoji, not "kamoji".

"Kao" is the japanese word for "face" and "moji" is "character".

That said, I don't think there's a "correct term" yet for these things. That's just what some people call them.