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Comment by myfonj | Hacker News Reader

I think that product template could use either `aria-hidden="true"` or `aria-label="bear"` HTML attributes for screen readers sake (and reconsider title and OG properties); not an expert in this area nor having SR at hand, but I guess that

    ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

would sound like 'pharyngeal voiced fricative - bullet - letter ain - bullet - glottal stop', what is hardly beneficial for screen reader users. Cool Unicode "picture" though, it's a pity such doodles hurts accessibility (sad smiley).

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Given that we can't expect everyone to use aria attributes, shouldn't screen readers just have a list of all widely used smileys with descriptive names (if they don't have it already)?

Good point and interesting question indeed. Finally tried simple speech synthesis demo [0] and in Win10 Firefox it really reads out some "basic ASCII-smileys" as their descriptive translation (and ignores any other set of non-alphabet characters, with few exceptions like underscores and asterisks).

Compiled all predefined textual emoticons offered by Gboard app in Android [1] and let the Narrate speech synthesis in Reader view (F9) read them aloud (uses presumably the same synthesis as example) - quite predictably most of them weren't heard at all, but those simple ones that were have surprised me.

So most probably there is no problem with that particular Unicode bear in screen readers after all.

[0] https://mdn.github.io/web-speech-api/speak-easy-synthesis/ [1] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/myfonj/f6b0ed1c783d16a79d...

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