I haven’t worked on front end for over a decade, so I am not familiar with recent development, but from the days I did, I remember adding the alt tag to images, but I never heard anything about soft hyphens.
Could it possibly be that the good and bad advice does not come from the same sources? And that we should listen to some sources and ignore the others? I can imagine that a set of advice that was reasonable at the beginning can grow through the game of telephone.
(Something similar happened with SEO advice, which started with “if you use keywords in the URL, Google will prioritize your page for the keyword, so use the page title in the URL rather than id=123”, and quickly mutated to “if you use id=123 in your URL, Google will refuse to index your page” that was obvious nonsense, but you could find it in 99% of articles about SEO. Or all that stuff “required by” GDPR.)
No, the lack of screen reader support for soft hyphens is a real thing, with actual user complaints behind it. Besides, that guidelines page doesn’t mention title attributes either; those are only very general guidelines, lacking details.
As far as ignoring some advice—sure. I ignore all of it, personally.
Even googling for “accessibility soft hyphen” did not return much. The #1 result on my computer says: “Well, screen readers mispronounce a lot of the words in a document or on a website. Should we just eliminate words entirely to prevent the problem? … The answer: It’s the responsibility of screen reader manufacturers to do a better job of recognizing and pronouncing hyphenated words.”
So it is does not seem like a frequent advice / complaint.
Some screen readers have issues with words that contain soft hyphens (they read syllables instead of words). Please note that this is not an issue of Hyphenator but a bug in the screen reader. Please contact the makers of the screen reader application.
The Reddit link goes to a post that has 1 karma, where 1 user suggests to remove the soft hyphens, 1 user disagrees… and that’s all.
In the Github debate, most people seem to agree that it is a bug of screen readers.
Only in the Apache link, someone recommends to do something about the hyphens. Even there, it seems to happen in context of discussing FOP, which is a PDF file generator. So as I understand it, it is not about “every web developer should adapt to the bugs of screen readers” but rather “authors of a PDF generator have an opportunity to compensate for the bugs of screen readers by automatically adding some PDF equivalent of ‘alt text’ containing the unhyphenated version of the word”. It still means compensating for someone else’s bug, but it’s a hack you only need to do once.
I think you have misunderstood my claims and my point.
The links I have posted were to demonstrate the fact that screen readers having a problem with soft hyphens is a real thing that really happens. (You seemed to be skeptical of this.)
That developers are sometimes told to not use soft hyphens, on account of this issue, is something for which I have and need no links, because, as I said initially, this is something which I, personally, have been told, by self-described accessibility advocates and/or disabled users, in discussions of actual websites which I have worked on. (You could disbelieve me on this, I suppose…)
And whether this specific advice/request/demand happens often is inconsequential. It is one example of a class of such things, which collectively one ends up hearing quite a bit, if one does serious web development work these days. The title attribute example was another. I could also have mentioned the deeply confusing and bizarre ARIA attributes.
Again: any specific such issue comes up only occasionally. But if I were to try to build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it, I would have to deal with many such issues—most of which could be fixed much more easily by the developers of the screen reader software… but aren’t. And the attitude of most accessibility advocates I’ve encountered has been that I should indeed take that (“build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it”) as my goal.
Achmiz is a bit salty because the issue came up occasionally with Gwern.net and other sites, and it’s striking that it came up at all because generally, even if there is a severe problem with a website, “theywill never tell you”. If you never ran into it, that might have as much to do with you not bothering with justification or typographic niceties like fixing linebreaks with manual soft hyphen use.
I haven’t worked on front end for over a decade, so I am not familiar with recent development, but from the days I did, I remember adding the alt tag to images, but I never heard anything about soft hyphens.
Could it possibly be that the good and bad advice does not come from the same sources? And that we should listen to some sources and ignore the others? I can imagine that a set of advice that was reasonable at the beginning can grow through the game of telephone.
(Something similar happened with SEO advice, which started with “if you use keywords in the URL, Google will prioritize your page for the keyword, so use the page title in the URL rather than id=123”, and quickly mutated to “if you use id=123 in your URL, Google will refuse to index your page” that was obvious nonsense, but you could find it in 99% of articles about SEO. Or all that stuff “required by” GDPR.)
For example, page Accessibility Principles on W3C homepage does not mention hyphens.
No, the lack of screen reader support for soft hyphens is a real thing, with actual user complaints behind it. Besides, that guidelines page doesn’t mention
titleattributes either; those are only very general guidelines, lacking details.As far as ignoring some advice—sure. I ignore all of it, personally.
Even googling for “accessibility soft hyphen” did not return much. The #1 result on my computer says: “Well, screen readers mispronounce a lot of the words in a document or on a website. Should we just eliminate words entirely to prevent the problem? … The answer: It’s the responsibility of screen reader manufacturers to do a better job of recognizing and pronouncing hyphenated words.”
So it is does not seem like a frequent advice / complaint.
Come now; you can do better than that.
A search for
screen reader "soft hyphen"easily finds this:https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/9343
A search for
"screen reader" "soft hyphen"easily finds these:https://www.reddit.com/r/accessibility/comments/lku7kq/comment/go5kkwy/
https://lists.apache.org/thread/8bjr2lxhy3jj4vqrqzdp98hlndbt3sol
https://github.com/e2b/wordpress-hyphenator
The last link goes to a page that says:
The Reddit link goes to a post that has 1 karma, where 1 user suggests to remove the soft hyphens, 1 user disagrees… and that’s all.
In the Github debate, most people seem to agree that it is a bug of screen readers.
Only in the Apache link, someone recommends to do something about the hyphens. Even there, it seems to happen in context of discussing FOP, which is a PDF file generator. So as I understand it, it is not about “every web developer should adapt to the bugs of screen readers” but rather “authors of a PDF generator have an opportunity to compensate for the bugs of screen readers by automatically adding some PDF equivalent of ‘alt text’ containing the unhyphenated version of the word”. It still means compensating for someone else’s bug, but it’s a hack you only need to do once.
I think you have misunderstood my claims and my point.
The links I have posted were to demonstrate the fact that screen readers having a problem with soft hyphens is a real thing that really happens. (You seemed to be skeptical of this.)
That developers are sometimes told to not use soft hyphens, on account of this issue, is something for which I have and need no links, because, as I said initially, this is something which I, personally, have been told, by self-described accessibility advocates and/or disabled users, in discussions of actual websites which I have worked on. (You could disbelieve me on this, I suppose…)
And whether this specific advice/request/demand happens often is inconsequential. It is one example of a class of such things, which collectively one ends up hearing quite a bit, if one does serious web development work these days. The
titleattribute example was another. I could also have mentioned the deeply confusing and bizarre ARIA attributes.Again: any specific such issue comes up only occasionally. But if I were to try to build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it, I would have to deal with many such issues—most of which could be fixed much more easily by the developers of the screen reader software… but aren’t. And the attitude of most accessibility advocates I’ve encountered has been that I should indeed take that (“build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it”) as my goal.
Achmiz is a bit salty because the issue came up occasionally with Gwern.net and other sites, and it’s striking that it came up at all because generally, even if there is a severe problem with a website, “they will never tell you”. If you never ran into it, that might have as much to do with you not bothering with justification or typographic niceties like fixing linebreaks with manual soft hyphen use.