CamelCase reminder for tagging new posts?

June 30, 2023 10:34 AM

Relatively small request: Can we change the text above the Tags field when making new posts so that it encourages using CamelCase when combining multiple words into one tag, to help members with visual impairments who use screenreaders? For instance, changing the example in the text "searchengine" to "SearchEngine"? This will help screenreading software better parse the meaning of the tag.

Current text:

Keywords. Separate each tag with a space, combine multiple words into a single word. (Example: searchengine google news)

Suggested text:

Keywords. Separate each tag with a space, combine multiple words into a single word, and capitalize each word in a combined tag to help members with visual impairment who use screenreaders. (Example: SearchEngine google news)

posted by mediareport to Feature Requests at 10:34 AM (43 comments total)

This is a great idea.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:55 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

If the object is to have them screen-read better, another way might be to have them automatically concatenated with a hyphen, like weird-things-cats-do or organizing-books or etc.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 11:04 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was under the impression that tags were lowercase-only for some reason. I'll gladly switch to CamelCase. Thanks for the post.
posted by Etrigan at 11:22 AM on June 30, 2023 [11 favorites]

chesty a arthur, I believe the request is specifically about screenreaders that read the screen aloud for those who have vision impairments, not to make the words scan better on silent reading. My (admittedly a long time ago) experience with screenreading software is that some of it speaks the hyphens aloud, and I imagine that would be annoying in its own way.
posted by cooker girl at 11:23 AM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm familiar with screenreaders -- some of them read mid-word hyphens as "dash" and some don't read them at all. However, it seems worth proposing some alternative ways to approach the problem, since we don't know how tags are stored and the search functionality/search results has a lot of detail that would need to be hashed out. (For an example of what I mean, select the ScreenReader tag and watch what happens to the intercaps in the search results -- they disappear. I don't even really know how people use tags though so I don't know if that's relevant.)
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 11:48 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I support this pony and also just the changing the culture around tagging in this way.

Also, a quick look at the pages for the tags "StarWars" and "starwars" (just to pick something at random) suggests to me that these are parsed the same way on the back-end.
posted by gauche at 11:53 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Such a great idea! I'll do this!

Thanks, mediareport!
posted by mochapickle at 12:28 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Will actively try to integrate CamelCase into my tags going forward. Thank you for this pony request and reminder.
posted by Fizz at 1:11 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thanks, I didn't know about this issue. I'll correct my most recent posts and do this going forward.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:09 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is an excellent suggestion. I’ve camelcased names for a long time, but I will do the same for other tags from here onward.
posted by Kattullus at 3:43 PM on June 30, 2023

Plus one for this request. I try to do this just because it makes it easier for me to parse tags, hadn't even considered screenreaders.

HowCanTheRestOfYouEvenReadSomeOfTheseLongTagsWithoutInternalCapitalization?
posted by the primroses were over at 4:10 PM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Add me to the list of people who didn't realize we could do that. I use CamelCase for websites and emails to make them more readable (not just for screenreaders, but for everyone). I will gladly do this for tags, but would greatly appreciate the reminder note on the posting page.
posted by hydra77 at 5:03 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I support this pony and in addition I'd just like to thank you, mediareport, for bringing it up here. I try to pay careful attention to accessibility, but I was unaware of this particular aspect of how screen readers work.

Even if the request isn't implemented right away, I'm very glad to know about this, and I will gladly try to remember to use CamelCase in my own tags from now on.

Thanks, mediareport!
posted by kristi at 5:34 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yay, y'all are great!
posted by mediareport at 9:36 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Metafilter should change the tagging explanation so it shows you to do it this way, because I believe it shows you no capitalization.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:44 AM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Metafilter should change the tagging explanation

Agree, I think both of these (CamelCase and a better explanation) are a good plan.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:14 AM on July 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

I've added that to the FAQ and am now working with frimble to get that text added to all the "new post" pages. It's non-trivial but we should be able to get that done
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:24 AM on July 1, 2023 [15 favorites]

GroupHug!
posted by wenestvedt at 8:27 AM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Group plate of beans!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 8:29 AM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

viva CamelCase! Silly but readable, 1995 PageMaker sends its love <3
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:26 AM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

[correction, according to wikipedia, PageMaker changed its capitalization in 1990; the more you know]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:29 AM on July 1, 2023

Pretty sure you mean RageMaker, rival to the formerly popular QuirkXpress.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 10:31 AM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh man so many earlier examples in the wikipedia article on CamelCase.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:36 AM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is now done on MeTa and I'll go through the other sites and get them done.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:17 PM on July 1, 2023 [14 favorites]

Yay! I learned about this on Mastodon last year and have been doing it for a while. Glad to see it here.
posted by chococat at 5:03 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

These are all done (eight more in all, I think) and frimble will put them on the production server when they are next at work.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:23 AM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Thanks so much, jessamyn! There was no rush, and I wish I'd recalled it was a holiday weekend before posting, but thanks for adding the text.

chococat, that's where I was first alerted to CamelCase, too; of all the norms in the Fediverse I encountered when first trying to sort out which community norms there made sense to me and which seemed like bullshit, the friendly, consistent encouragement to use CamelCase for tags stuck out as an easy and very useful one.
posted by mediareport at 10:41 AM on July 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thank you for doing this. I'll CamelCase my posts from here on.
posted by doctornemo at 12:08 PM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

On another note, the small html command option is not working for me. Doubleyouteeeff question mark why why why?

On another note, the < small > < /small > option is not working for me. Doubleyouteeeff question mark why why why?

Oh, great -- now it works...
posted by y2karl at 1:55 PM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

On a related unrelated note, I wish anyone on our my our contact list could could edit my our comments for typos and grammar within 30 minutes of initial posting. Thank you in advance for your time, attention and consideration in regard to this matter
posted by y2karl at 2:05 PM on July 2, 2023

This is now deployed sitewide. If people see a New Post box that does not have CamelCase as part of the suggestion please let us know.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:14 AM on July 3, 2023 [8 favorites]

At long last, it's time for BackTagging 2.0!

(Kidding. I think.)
posted by box at 9:43 AM on July 4, 2023

Yeah, I had been wondering if something like this could be automated. Run a script that identifies

A) Words that are sometimes written in Camel Case but on some occasion are not. So for example, if someone has tagged AndroidApp then it would flag androidapp.
B) Words that are not in a dictionary but divided into words that are in a dictionary. For example kidsbooks, is not a word, but can be divided into kids books which are both words.

Then maybe we'd want to get some human eyes on this. Most would be flagged for "yes, find and replace it" but a few might be left as is or camel-cased in different ways. For example seathat could be SeatHat or SeaThat (ok, not likely those are actual tags, but my point is there are probably things that have multiple real-word parsings).

Another thing you could do is remove the tag from the list of things requiring human attention if one of the parsed options exists in the text of the post. So for example if the post says "kids books" or "sea that" then you can assume that was the tag's intent.

But then I thought, how often are people reading the tags specifically to access long-ago posts and given that the answer is probably not very often, this probably isn't that useful.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:55 AM on July 4, 2023

IOIHaP:
But then I thought, how often are people reading the tags specifically to access long-ago posts and given that the answer is probably not very often, this probably isn't that useful.

Maybe not on the front page (although sometimes), but more likely in Ask, I imagine.
posted by dismas at 9:33 AM on July 5, 2023

Fantastic idea, was jumping in here to say that I would do this from now on, but so glad to see the site itself moving on it. This right here is MeTa at its best. Well done everyone!
posted by Dysk at 4:42 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is there any reason not to edit existing tags automagically or does that violate some MF fundamental ethos? I understand that programming effort is far from free too, but if it would help folks a lot it might be worth finding a volunteer that could be somehow slotted into things.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:11 PM on July 7, 2023

Legitimately read that as "mother fucking fundamental ethos."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:39 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: some mother fucking fundamental ethos.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:02 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is there any reason not to edit existing tags automagically or does that violate some MF fundamental ethos?

Definitely doesn't violate the ethos but probably not something that's going to rise to the top of the todo list. Cutting up long tags into individual words is something that is easy for a human but less-easy for a computer.

I just tried to see if I could add a CamelCase tag to a post that had a non-CamelCase tag (in this case just trying to replace Shhhh with ShHhh in hippbybear's post for proof of concept) and was unable to because it said the tag was already there. I believe mutual contacts of a poster can add/remove tags so people can at least do a little tidying.

What might be easier to accomplish is looking at frequently used tags in Ask that are easy to do bulk find and replace. Like replacing sanfrancisco and newyork (two of the most popular tags) with SanFrancisco and NewYork though I suspect those two examples are pretty legible to screen readers anyhow. I'll check in with frimble and see how plausible this is.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:30 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wasn't there a project a few years ago with volunteers who added tags?

I'd volunteer to join a community Tag Team.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:48 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

jessamyn: "This is now deployed sitewide. If people see a New Post box that does not have CamelCase as part of the suggestion please let us know."

Just noticed that while the updated guidance is initially showing on new post pages, it still shows the original text when the post is previewed. First noticed on Ask and tested on MeFi and MeTa, so probably happening on the other subsites as well.

Given most posts likely go through a few rounds of previews before even getting to the tag part (I always leave that for last to avoid accidentally posting early!), might want to update those pages too so people don't miss it.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:11 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd volunteer to join a community Tag Team.

TagTeam, surely.

(I'd also volunteer a bit of time to this.)
posted by gauche at 6:18 AM on July 11, 2023

might want to update those pages too so people don't miss it.

Code fixed on that, nice catch. Waiting for frimble to push it to the live site.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:12 AM on July 11, 2023 [2 favorites]