Hey new people, you don't need to use link shorteners on Mastodon 🙂
All links on Mastodon are counted as 23 characters towards your post size limit, regardless of how long they actually are.
More info at https://fedi.tips/you-dont-need-link-shorteners-on-mastodon
[#]FediTips #MastoTips #Mastodon
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@FediTips Caveat: If a screen reader user is going to read your post and you put a link that isn't short in the post, have it be the last thing in the post. If it's just whatever.tld/thing or something you should be fine, but if it's even some articles that use wordpress or otherwise have long links it's too long and we assume there's no more text after the link and will stop speech once the link starts being read out because it just takes too long. That's the consensus I've been able to gather anyway. Of course for posts with multiple links that have those for a reason this is slightly problematic, and in that case put them on separate lines so maybe a screen reader using a web-based client can navigate by line through the post?
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@x0
Thanks for bringing this up!
Do screen reader apps read the entire link every time, regardless of how long the link is?
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@FediTips It depends on the fedi client actually, but it's up to the client not the screen reader itself. If the client truncates the link as displayed visually, E.G> with an elipsis, then the screen reader should probably also see that and truncate. But if the text of the link is displayed in full, then the screen reader will read it in full. The client I'm using actually speaks directly through the screen reader and thus also has it spoken fully, it's a client designed specifically for blind users. In sum, if it's displayed visually in full, that text is given to the screen reader, and thus it's going to read it in full too, as it will act based on what it is given with minimal transformation for just blocks of text. Transformation comes into play for complex elements like those in HTML, E.G. speaking the word link before reading out the name of a link, but text is text and unless the app goes out of its way to expose something different to the screen reader than what is shown, which is platform, screen reader and framework ddependent, what you see is ideally what you get in terms of text.
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@x0
Okay, that's really interesting to hear.
So, if I understand correctly, if the Fedi client shortens it with an elipsis then there isn't a problem?
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@FediTips Yes, that'll be given as is to the screen reader with the elipsis included. If it's displayed in full, though, as most things on desktop at least would do, it will be read out fully. Someone posted an Amazon link once. This entire 700+ character link would be read out... You should use shortened amazon links for that reason I'd suspect, although removing tracking info might also be enough. If you plug an amazon link into bitly you get their custom amzn.to, or the share thing for emailing links might do it.
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@x0
Thank you so much for taking the time on detailing this perspective. I will try to look into this further for the fedi.tips website.
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@FediTips You're welcome! I'm by no mmeans a representative speaker for the blind community, but I can try and put you in touch with a few others to get a wider perspective. You might also try posting that you're looking for perspectives of people with different disabilities, blindness, deafness, other visual impairments etc, a fair few of them might already follow you and reach out.
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@x0
Yup, definitely, that is sort of what I was planning to do!
There was a somewhat similar situation a while ago about whether hashtags are more accessible at the end of posts or mixed in with the main text. Different people gave different perspectives, so I posted a poll and thread asking just screen reader users about where to put hashtags.
The results were a split of about 66% for tags at the end and 33% tags mixed in with the text, so it was well worth asking as it wasn't unanimous.
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@FediTips Yup I think I remember seeing that. I'd personally say it depends on how they're being used. if you tag individual words in your sentence that otherwise make sense without the hashtags, doing that's fine, and the word 'number' or 'hashtag' shouldn't be too much in the way, even less if just one symbol in Braille. Then you put extra auxiliary ones at the end that you couldn't fit in a sentence, after any links. If you use ending mentions I'm unsure exactly where those go.
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