I would really like to read this article about the blind engineer on the new Star Trek show

[kestrell]

but this article is printed with some fancy font that is filled with characters that are unreadable by my screen reader.

My ironies surpass all others.

Here is the article so others can read it and hey, look, he's telepathic, too! So it's as if you rolled Geordie, Counselor Troy, and O'Brien all into one character...cooool....

On 'Strange New Worlds,' Meet The Blind Telepathic Engineer
'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' co-stars Bruce Horak as Hemmer. Bruce Horak is a Visually Impaired Performer Creator, according to his website. He's an actor, playwright, composer, visual artist, and other things, so that sounds about right. He's also legally blind, seeing about 9% of what the average person does. On May 5, 2022, the relatively unknown Canadian co-stars in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," the latest installment of the venerable franchise. Horak portrays Hemmer, a blind telepathic Aenar who works as an engineer on the USS Enterprise. A company Hemmer is a tyrant at work, but he's also a miracle worker:
https://technotrenz.com/entertainment/on-strange-new-worlds-meet-the-blind-telepathic-engineer-1870634.html

Comments

En route to your email

[jesse_the_k]

Okay, I saw no weird fonts. There is a constantly-updating banner that spits out a letter at a time, pauses very briefly then clears and repeats.

The article makes no typographic distinction between author and interviewee -- good thing you're pro at contextual clues.

Re: En route to your email

[alexxkay]

Kes asked me to help, and I have... partial findings.

1) At the beginning of the second paragraph ("On April 30"...), JAWS says "Russian" before reading the text.

2) The issue thereafter, though very frequent, is with a single common character: the lower-case "a". JAWS renders it as "question mark" (or something like that, now I forget), breaking many words into two parts. Visually, this "a" is completely identical to a normal "a" in multiple fonts.

3) If the text is pasted into Word, the spellchecker also doesn't perceive the problematic "a", and the text is full of red-underlined words.

4) I selected and copied a problem-a, then did a search and replace with a normal "a". Both the spellchecker and JAWS stopped having funky results at that point.

5) The first problem-a happens to be in the middle of the name "Horak". Now, the actor spells his own name with (apparently) completely ordinary English letters, even on his personal web site. But Wiktionary thinks it's derived from a Czech name that does have a funky character there: "Horák".

6) Hypothesis: At some point in the writing process, someone tried to spell "Horak" the Czech way. Something went Wrong. Perhaps their word processor got confused at that point, and thought it was supposed to use an accented "a" all the time from now on. When the writer looked up at the screen and saw all those accents, they tried to fix it, but something else Went Wrong. All of the accented "a" characters were replaced -- by a character from a technically-different alphabet (Russian?), which was visually indistinguishable from a standard "a". At which point, they thought the problem was fixed...

Re: En route to your email

[jesse_the_k]

Yep! We independently reached the same conclusion: the trick is in the lowercase as.

The Czech character "Latin a acute" á is U+00E1 (In HTML, that's á)

I searched and replaced the ás with plain old as (aka U+0061 or a) and dumbed down the quotes while I was at it in the revised version I sent before dinner.

Re: En route to your email

[alexxkay]

I applaud your icon choice!

[Description: A large capital "S", with a small round hole through one of the cross-bits at the end. Captioned in smaller text: "I shot the serif."]