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.
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.