A11Y improvements (especially to the Dutch texts)

[dirkinfi]

Lijndikte aangepast voor zichtbaarheid Afstand tot de tekst wat groter gemaakt voor leesbaarheid

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[dirkinfi]

LET OP: ik heb overal <span lang=\"en\"> en toegevoegd, maar de resultaten zijn nog niet helemaal eenduidig. Ik ga er maandag met Sterre naar kijken.

[jeroenheijmans]

Cheers! I had the same question @dirkinfi - does this add a significant improvement? I'd presume that screen readers are very capable of dealing with loan words, and that they'd ignore short snippets in another lang?

PS. There's an open discussion in #63 whether we want to go back with this entire open source project to Dutch as the default language, but if we could for now stick to English conversations that would be appreciated 🙏🏻

[dirkinfi]

@jeroenheijmans screen readers do NOT handle loanwords gracefully (you'll get horrible steenkolenengels), and it's not a big amount of work to add the language-tag. That said, if found out that VoiceOver (the Apple default screenreader) does not always handle the tagged snippets correctly either. So as a learning experience, Sterre is asking Job if this is something we can improve or not. But adding the correct tags is in my opinion a small task, and you should (imho) get into the habit of adding them.

[dirkinfi]

(BTW I'm new to interfering with code and working in Github, so feel free to talk to me if I do this 'wrong'. For example, I have no idea what the desired opknipstrategie is for pull requests. Personally I'd separate the line-thickness fix from the language-tag-fix, but Steven recommended putting them in one branch 'a11y changes'.)

[jeroenheijmans]

Thx @dirkinfi for going along with the GitHub process! So far so good, and many choices (like how granular things should be) are also subjective, so asking around is often a good solution.

Let's discuss the status of the PR in person some time soon, and then we'll bring back our conclusions to GitHub for visibility? We can probably finish this work together and get the improvements merged.

[jeroenheijmans]

Update: Discussed the PR offline with Dirk, will summarize here a bit later and help get the changes across. We also find several other improvements (some A11Y related) which I'll put into fresh tickets.

[jeroenheijmans]

After some discussion and investigation together with @dirkinfi we found that:

• reducing English loan words in the Dutch texts is preferred whenever possible, the screen reader sticks to a single voice in one fluent reading
• some Dutch loan words get proper pronunciation if the spelling is tweaked, e.g. "backups" does not work well, but "back-ups" is read properly (at the least by Narrator)
• abbreviations don't always need to be marked English, and the proper semantic html <abbr> can fix screen reading
• we still doubt in some cases if it's "worth" having a <span lang="en"> term halfway through a sentence, because it causes a pause, and possibly screen reader users are actually accustomed to loan words not causing such a switch in voice... still for many cases it sounded best to leave those span elements there so I left them

Additionally:

• I reviewed all changes carefully again
• I rebased and fixed all merge conflicts (because of recent other merges)
• I marked this PR as ready for review
• I will add the other improvements Dirk and I discussed in separate issues

I'll ask a second person to double check the end result, but I think it's now good to go.