Alt text with apostrophe is garbled

[MarchAir]

I just discovered that my alt text added to the photos of one of my listings for a pattern name that includes an apostrophe has a bunch of garbled characters instead of the apostrophe. That won’t help anyone who is visually impaired be able to read it!

The pattern name is O’Hara and it does need an apostrophe. But Etsy’s alt text is putting it as O'Hara. Isn’t that sort of flaw due to really outdated technology?

#alt text #apostrophe #outdated,

[VintageRescueSquad]

You can't use punctuation. I would just use it without. The thing is that alt-text is read aloud, I believe, so Ohara will be "pronounced" the same.

We use alt-text for our images at work, and can't use punctuation. Is the pattern name necessary? Alt-text is supposed to be descriptive....

[MarchAir]

Yes, but the English standard and best grammar IS to use punctuation. Punctuation is part of culture and the advancement of civilization. Etsy should not be regressing to the pre-literate era!

This particular item’s name has contained an apostrophe for over 120 years, so why should it be written improperly?

I realize that Etsy is probably not going to fix it, but this kind of dumb-ness on the part of any modern corporation is just irritating! Programmers SHOULD be able to do better than this!

(Yes, my alt text is describing what’s in the photos, and yes, the pattern name is needed so that potential buyers will know which pattern it is and not just some generic glass.)

[LandKbeads · Accepted solution]

That code sequence is an apostrophe in ASCII or HTML. However, screen readers don’t read ASCII or html.

For that matter, screen readers don’t read most apostrophes so it’s a safe bet to just leave it out.

[MarchAir]

Thanks for the explanation!
It is really hard to write incorrectly according to how we were taught! [grin] I still think that is outdated technology — is ASCII even used anymore? I know that HTML has gone through a lot of changes since I last was coding in it. But anyway, are screen readers the only purpose for adding alt text? Or do other entities read it as well? I will try to write incorrectly for the benefit of the screen readers. But if this is used for other purposes, then I question the logic of the makers of the alt text parameters.

[LandKbeads]

Yes, ASCII is still being used as is Binary and Etsy converts all special characters to ASCII before it’s stored in the database. Screen readers are NOT the reason special characters are converted to ASCII, but honestly there is no reason Etsy can’t convert the ASCII back to special characters to display them, they just don’t.