Blaming Screen Readers 🚩×5
December 11, 2024
The title of this post is pretty specific. It relates to the meme on Twitter where users identify a trait or preference that they see as problematic, and identify it as a red flag. The emoji represents the red flag. For example:
Blaming Screen Readers 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩And here we see the usual pattern repeat itself. An inaccessible meme goes viral. After it is so tired that brands use it, someone relying on assistive technology points out how annoying this can be. Authors and developers jump up to blame assistive technology for being terrible at internetting.
Because social media, particularly service like Twitter (and now Bluesky and Mastodon) are essentially plain text based (like email was originally) folks keep coming up with clever ways to use emoji, text patterns (emoticons like 🙂 originated with text only email and newsgroups).
But these are often woefully inaccessible for screen reader users.
The response of many folks to which is to–blame screen readers (then ‘helpfully’ suggest fixes).
Adrian Roselli discusses this more and concludes we should
“be more thoughtful in how you post your content (memes). Be considerate of others, even if it takes an extra minute. Stop offloading blame. Stop making it someone else’s problem.”
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