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Blaming Screen Readers 🚩×5

• There is, apparently, a trend going around on Twitter (example tweet): to state something that raises red flags for you, followed by a number of ‘red flag emojis’, i.e. “🚩”.
• Except that this isn’t a red flag emoji, other than by coincidence. It could just as easily have been yellow or green. What screen readers actually announce when they reach that emoji is “triangular flag on post”. So the meaning is lost on screen reader users.
• The great Adrian Roselli gives a detailed write-up of the problem – and plenty of places where it’s cropped up in the past – in this blog post. He’s heard a number of responses from people along the lines of “the screen reader is the problem”; Adrian argues otherwise, stating that screen readers don’t use natural language processing and do not ‘see what you see’. Nor can screen readers be updated overnight, to suddenly understand these short-lived trends and memes.
• The onus is on us to write our content in an accessible way. The blog post summary is frustratingly vague on answers: “Techniques to make your content accessible abound. They are no more than a quick search away should you care to try”, which doesn’t explain what you should do if you want to participate in a trend but the trend is inherently inaccessible. My personal recommendation would be to write an ‘alt text’ “reply” to your tweet, to clarify the original tweet for screen reader users.

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