FAO YT / BFC Twitter people

The custom font text you guys keep doing.

I’ve been told it plays hell with screen readers for blind/partially sighted people. Just wanted to make you aware, if you weren’t.

Examples:

 

It would also be helpful to add Alt text for any picture. It’s really quick to do, when adding a picture just click to edit and then type a description where it says ‘alt’. When all the detail is in the picture such as the score or substitution, a visually impaired person has no idea what the tweet is about. It isn’t visible to other users, except they may see it say ‘alt’ in the bottom corner but not the text description. You don’t have to type out all the text in the image, just whatever detail is needed to give an overall description. It’s quite frustrating for a blind person to hear their screen reader say ‘image’ and then no description is forthcoming and they’re left guessing.





Lydia and Bobbie say thank you!

 

This is the first time these issues have been brought to my attention and I do actually know a handful of blind or partially sighted Reds fans. Always good to learn something new. Can’t say I ever looked at it like that.

It’s practically the entire country doing it too. The font thing and graphics rather than words for certain things (team news etc). Definitely something to look into and discuss in the (very short) off-season.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

My understanding is that it works fine with more modern ones but some of the older versions that are still heavily used (used more heavily than the modern ones) don’t know what to do with it.

Probably not a massive problem, when it’s a single word. But worth mentioning.

Emoji have the same problem too.

 

Yes, lots of people use older ones as it’s hard to learn how to use new technology, especially when you are visually impaired.

 

As a father of 2 children with disabilities I have to say this is a lovely thread! Great to see people caring about others. COYR.

 

Interesting stuff. Food for thought.

 

Basically whitey you're blindest and disablist.

Next you'll be tweeting using the letters 'th' so that our fans from Sheffield can't read them either.

 

I'm involved in a lot of WCAG compliance projects at work; there is lots of info out there which you might find helpful. Just Google WCAG compliance.

 

I naively thought this thread would mean that the club would stop using that font after it was pointed out to them that it means some of their fans are unable to read the tweets. Not using it isn’t really something that needs looking up and to be honest, the usability aside, I think it looks absolutely awful. However, it seems like we are doing it more than ever. Even if every other club is (I have no idea if they are or not) it doesn’t mean we have to. Doing it before it has been pointed out is completely fair enough but once they are aware of the problem it seems really rude and uncaring about a section of their fan base.

The last three tweets in a row have all used it, is it really worth making a tweet completely inaccessible to people just for the writing to look like that instead of Twitter’s normal font?



Edit: now last 4 tweets. It’s starting to look intentional to be honest.

 

Pretty disappointing that 4 months after this was brought to the attention of the club they're still doing it.





Not blaming Whitey for this, I know it's not his decision, at least not solely. It's still very disappointing though.

Here's an example of how this sounds on even a modern assistive technology.

 

It looks **** anyway.

 

Totally agree.

 

After much discussion at the club regards this issue, we can confirm that we won't be using custom font in the same manner going forward on social media. This was an issue we meant to address more in the off-season but we didn't actually have any downtime, due to the quick turnaround, and then a million and one other things to deal with, so we didn't address it.

If anyone would like to know why we used custom font, and why the majority of verified accounts (certainly in the sports industry) will continue to, feel free to email us on media@barnsleyfc.co.uk where we'd be happy to discuss things further. But we pride ourselves as a club on being all-inclusive and leaving nobody behind. So we feel that it's only right to address and adjust accordingly.

Cheers.

 

Cheers Andy. Not trying to be awkward!

Might be worth the club making a point of it. Not exactly a campaign but might help raise the issue in the sporting sphere.

 

Hells bells!! It is over 10 years since I retired and I only skirted briefly with Assistive technology and website compliance mainly liaising with specialist bods working on making Govt websites compliant. I recall JAWS and Zoomtext being amongst the favoured screen readers/assitive technology at the time (JAWS even capable of providing braille output). A lot of work was carried out making webpages navigable for visually impaired or blind people. I was wondering how the technology has progressed. Not much it would appear if they still have difficulty with individual fonts.
Out of curiosity is it free screen readers that are the issue or full professional packages like the aforementioned JAWS?

 

The issue is that they’re not alternative fonts, they’re mathematical symbols. The screen reader is doing its job.

 

Great.