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LukeBMM | 2 years ago

As a (relatively, though age is catching up with my vision, admittedly) able-bodied Westerner who reads no other languages than English, I find this opinion shocking. Would paraphrasing your point as, "I don't think anyone who reads in any way other than the one I'm familiar with deserves knowledge," have a different impact, or does that seem ok to you, too?

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AlienRobot|2 years ago

No. The correct paraphrase would be "I think you should recognize that text is different from speech and English is different from Japanese and welcome the diversity of media of knowledge instead of trying to make an one-size-fits-all solution for every method to convey information that the human body is capable of."

Imagine if I had a markup language for voice synthesis. If I typed a word, the computer would say out loud that word. But I had tags like <whisper> and <yell> to change the volume of the computer voice, and <pausedly> and <quickly> to change its speed. These tags make no sense in the text medium, and yet their semantics are self-evident in speech.

If authors had a way to mark up how their text should be voiced, perhaps they would mark them so. Who wouldn't love a real <sarcasm> tag for sarcastically voiced text? But HTML went the opposite way. Instead of providing more tools to let authors express themselves, they took every format of expression and dumped it in a single label.

LukeBMM|2 years ago

Changing the context to voice markup doesn't in any way change or address the core point, which is that you really seem to be expressing that you only care about the way that you happen to consume text and therefore any other viewpoints are superfluous. Also that you're willing to go out of your way to create and publish a plugin to effectively sabotage anyone trying to do anything else.

Of all the opinions someone could hold strongly, that's certainly one of them.