[94/365] a new nexus of my interests
Apr. 4th, 2021 09:51 pmThis morning, I got asked a question I felt like I should know the answer to but I didn't. I feel I should because it's about language, gender and screenreaders. If I wasn't me, I'd ask me too!
But I didn't know the answer partly because I only speak English and this is much less of an issue in English than it is for languages that are more compulsorily gendered. Like my friend said, "This mostly to write in Spanish and German, where almost everything is gendered. I used to use *, so "profesor*s" for teachers. Some people use _, as in "profesor_s".But these things, I am told, make it hard for people who use software that reads them the documents."
She asked if I had any tips for that, and I absolutely did not. I realized to my chagrin that I'd never considered this before. So I asked Mastodon, where I know some full-time screenreader users (I'm very much not), some speakers of other European languages (the ones that tend to be gendered), and at least a couple of people who I knew to be both!
I widened the question out a bit too by musing on how my general, uninformed approach would be to think about how these words would be pronounced by a human if someone had to read them out, and to try to write them accordingly. Like, I'm aware of the lenguaje inclusivo "e" for Spanish (and my friend is too, but says that doesn't work for all words because the "e" is sometimes masculine and sometimes there's no vowel-gendered ending) which has the virtue of being pronounable (unlike the "x" as in Latinx, which isn't pronounceable by the rules of Spanish or by screenreaders). And this meant I could ask anyone who speaks relevant languages how they'd read out such things if they saw them. My friend says she's been part of discussions about this with the asterisks, where the conclusion seemed to be "make it a longer pause" but no one seemed sure if that was good.
But I didn't know the answer partly because I only speak English and this is much less of an issue in English than it is for languages that are more compulsorily gendered. Like my friend said, "This mostly to write in Spanish and German, where almost everything is gendered. I used to use *, so "profesor*s" for teachers. Some people use _, as in "profesor_s".But these things, I am told, make it hard for people who use software that reads them the documents."
She asked if I had any tips for that, and I absolutely did not. I realized to my chagrin that I'd never considered this before. So I asked Mastodon, where I know some full-time screenreader users (I'm very much not), some speakers of other European languages (the ones that tend to be gendered), and at least a couple of people who I knew to be both!
I widened the question out a bit too by musing on how my general, uninformed approach would be to think about how these words would be pronounced by a human if someone had to read them out, and to try to write them accordingly. Like, I'm aware of the lenguaje inclusivo "e" for Spanish (and my friend is too, but says that doesn't work for all words because the "e" is sometimes masculine and sometimes there's no vowel-gendered ending) which has the virtue of being pronounable (unlike the "x" as in Latinx, which isn't pronounceable by the rules of Spanish or by screenreaders). And this meant I could ask anyone who speaks relevant languages how they'd read out such things if they saw them. My friend says she's been part of discussions about this with the asterisks, where the conclusion seemed to be "make it a longer pause" but no one seemed sure if that was good.
- Several people did say they'd pause, and some said it was pronounced as a glottal stop which to many people will sound similar to a pause, but others made a point of saying it was a longer pause, like an ellipsis (one, interestingly, said that they stick with a glottal stop around people who are likely to be familiar with gender-neutral language but use a longer ellipsis when they want to make sure it's understood).
- Some suggested rewording the sentence with words similar in meaning but which don't have gender markers, like the "substantiviertes Partizip" in German.
- Interestingly, one person who'd tried a screenreader ("the first open-source one they found") said that the asterisk is very annoying without configuration --
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
diffrentcolours had already made the technical point to me that the one screenreader he'd tried in helping me get Linux on my laptop, which was the KDE one, allowed this kind of configuration. I'm sure it's useful for like surnames that aren't pronounced properly by the screenreader, never mind specialist stuff like me trying to fathom IPA symbols when they were either read as the nearest-looking English letter or just skipped altogether. But it could also be really useful here!
- Anyway, that screenreader-using person went on to offer better alternatives than the asterisk: "The · sounds good but it is not in a practical position on my keyboard. The : produced the same output (just a little pause) but is much more accessible while writing so this is what I am using right now." Other people gave examples with the : and ·. That middle-dot doesn't seem possible for me to make with my keyboard at all, so if the : works well with screenreaders, that has the potential to be really valuable because it's a very ordinary keyboard key.
- Another possible screenreader configuration could be the suggestion of one Spanish speaker, who says they say "e" when they see an "x" or a "@" (an older attempt at gender-neutral endings in Spanish, picked because the symbol visually resembles an "o" and an "a")