dai11y 19/01/2022

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WordleBot is a shortcut that brings accessibility to your Wordle results

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in 2022, you’ll no doubt have come across Wordle, the viral word guessing game that has people sharing their results in a grid on social media, like so:

Screenshot of ChrisBAshton's tweet: "Wordle 214 3/6", followed by three rows of coloured squares.
I’m not just sharing this one because I got a fantastic score…

The resulting grid of coloured squares represents how many letters of each guess was correct, and ultimately how many guesses were needed before the correct word was arrived at. But it’s something of an accessibility nightmare for screen reader users.

Federico Viticci has attempted to fix the issue, by building WordleBot. This is a shortcut for iOS and macOS which edits the text in your clipboard to have a more accessible output, like so:

Wordle 207 5/6

⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ (2 partial)
🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ (2 partial)
⬜🟩🟨🟩⬜ (1 partial, 2 perfect)
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 (3 perfect)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 (Wordle done on Line 5)— Federico Viticci (@viticci) January 12, 2022

It’s a nice idea, and a valiant effort by Federico, but is a manual workaround that only works for Apple customers. I’d like to see somebody build a Twitter bot that automatically responds to inaccessible Wordle tweets and provides alt text responses – or better yet, the creator of Wordle could change the share text directly.

PS: Wordle has inspired all sorts of creative endeavours, including a Wordle-to-music generator, Wordle-to-Townscaper and Wordle cross-stitching!


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