Breathe Until I Can’t

My friendship allowed a moment of escape to wiggle into my life. This guy wasn’t holding me against the wall, crushing my chest with a heavy suitcase, trapping me inside a dorm room while he screamed at me. I called him and talked about anything. We were friends. He was 6 hours behind my time zone.

One night, I barely slept, having laid in the bathtub talking to him the whole night not to disturb my mom who I shared a bed with. This was 2021. I was turning 23 soon. I worked two jobs and killing myself in fatigue.

I made coffee 5am and looked at my mom sitting on the recliner.

“I’m in trouble,” I told her. She was confused. I said, “I talked to someone for five hours straight and didn’t sleep. I felt more love for someone in those five hours than I have ever felt in the six years I’ve been with [my ex]. What do you do when you learn what being loved actually feels like?”

You want to know what it feels like? After escaping? After starting fresh with a person you fell in love with?

Someone coming to your university campus after purchasing weaponry and ammunition, having access to automatic weaponry, leaving a voicemail saying he was finding me one way or another.

I'm gonna be a bit of a Debbie Downer for a second and point out that it's not just people who use screen readers who have difficulty with those fonts. It's also people with dyslexia, lower reading comprehension, lack of familiarity with cursive or fancy fonts, and non-native speakers.

I myself am none of the above, but I still can't read more than one or two words of either strikethrough or Zalgo text before I can feel a strain in my eyes.

For those who are able to visually read the words, I'll explain what the issue is with screen readers. Fancy Unicode Text isn't actually text. It's letters formed by unicode symbols that were created for use in, for example, mathematical equations. Each of those symbols has a name, and a screen reader will read out each "letter"'s name instead of reading the whole word. I'll put an example below, as an image, to save people who are using screen readers to read this post (there's a brief alt text though).

example courtesy of https://givemefonts.com/blog/accessibility-in-unicode

So, now that everyone is up to speed on the question, I have one question and two possible solutions.

The question: What is the purpose of using the fancy unicode text?

First possible solution: If you just want to be able to differentiate the font and/or colour of text within a fic, you can do that with a work skin and leave the text fully readable by screen readers. Here's one that was created for Undertale and has a whole bunch of web safe fonts you can switch between. There's one for Homestuck as well. And a third workskin that does lots of formatting, including fonts and colours.

Second possible solution: If you're going for a specific look that can only be achieved by fancy unicode text, then you might want to include that as an image and set the image's alt text to be the plain text version.

In most cases cases the snarl of glitch text or long strings of unicode-symbol-names-being-read-aloud is an automatic 'hell no'. Basically either is right up there with overly long ASCII/emoticon dividers in terms of annoyance factor. Also, a lot of the look of unicode-symbols-as-text can be more-or-less replicated by font and style changes such as using bold and italic or a cursive font, which are at least TTS friendly even if not always particularly great for people who sight-read with vision/perception issues. Though I would hope people with those issues are at least using software that ignores document CSS and forces the use of friendly-to-them fonts and formatting (the software I use has such features in addition to TTS, you just have to have enough sight to go through the menus changing things to your particular satisfaction).

So I highly second just using Cool Regular Text instead of unicode text, with maybe an optional skin if you want to be particularly spiffy about it (though note that skins get thrown away when the fic is downloaded, so I and my ereader likely wouldn't even notice any difference... unless the lack of skin causes a bunch of stuff to break in creative ways). So yes, look at the skins linked in the above reply, if you're really ambitious maybe even hit up the W3 Schools site and learn some CSS for ways of affecting text appearance yourself.

Apparently there isn’t much news coverage of this outside of the islands

Towns are flooded, homes destroyed and collapsed, roads collapsed, lives at risk, gas leaks from the flood damage

Haleiwa and Waialua are currently evacuated because the 120 year old dam is at risk of bursting

Mind you that damn is owned by Dole. Theyve known about it needing to be fixed for years and years and years. Despite having more than enough money they refuse

The state has been trying to buy it out from them for years so they can fix it, but the sale hasn’t gone through

Keep in mind that the Dole family were the ones who illegally imprisoned Queen Liliuʻokalani and illegally overthrew the monarchy.

If I see another goddamn person say how sad this is for the tourists whose “trips were ruined” and compare a messed up vacation to people losing their homes, belongings, and livelihoods, I’m going to lose my mind

I am so lucky that my family or friend’s are safe and the few whose houses flooded didnt have it too bad, but so so so many were not as fortunate

If you haven’t heard anything about this until now, I suggest looking into it

The sirens didn’t go off until the flood had been going on for hours. Our state government is spending so much money on a fucking monorail we don’t need rather than fixing the infrastructure.

It’s been the locals and Kanaka doing the most to help get people to safety from the start

I don’t really know how to end this

I just need to know people are aware

you will simply never believe what she has imprinted on so swiftly and immediately, the first thing she's ever DIRECTLY ASKED FOR FOR CHRISTMAS

it's the cunty xneomorph

because everything with a tail is he/him (all the animals she knows)

And everything without a tail is she/her (every human she knows)

My in laws have a girl dog who is allowed the she/her label but she is an Aussie dog and has a teeeeeny cropped tail

Percy the Unicorn is a blanket that sometimes she thinks is a tail so some days Percy is he/him and some days Percy is she/her