Provide textual description for symbol/punctuation items

[YannCebron]

Sometimes it's a bit hard to distinguish the symbol to type.

e.g. “ vs. ” and ‘ vs. ’

Ideally, TT would add descriptions to all symbols by using some builtin map symbol->description text and show it automatically. This would also help using custom lessons to use non-default dicts (e.g. Emily Symbol System).

[didoesdigital]

Thanks for sharing this @YannCebron !

Are there particular lessons where punctuation is hard to distinguish? E.g. the punctuation lesson specifically or coding lessons or story lessons with dialogue or…?

Where might textual descriptions appear?

I didn’t quite follow what you meant about “help using custom lessons to use non-default dicts (e.g. Emily Symbol System)”, can you share some more detail there?

[YannCebron]

Technically this should appear everywhere punctuation appears, probably via setting to turn it on/off.

Whenever a "punctuation word" appears, its textual description could be shown underneath it to clarify the current symbol. (basically a builtin version of references like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographical_symbols_and_punctuation_marks)

w/r to custom lessons, e.g. https://github.com/EPLHREU/emily-symbols offers way more punctuation symbols than the ones commonly appearing in TT lessons and regular texts, and the variations are thus more subtle making this feature even more needed.

[didoesdigital]

Ah! That all makes sense. I appreciate the extra detail and the visual.

This might work well as a setting called “Punctuation descriptions” next to “Simple typography”, so that people can turn it off if it’s too much visual clutter for them that they find it distracting, but it could default to on so it’s easy to discover.

It could possibly show a description for any material that is made only of punctuation i.e. ; and/* but not ”example.” where sentence context could help distinguish punctuation characters. It might be useful to have a limit and only show it on something like 3 character items so it doesn’t show a dozen words on ============ in the markdown lesson.

For the multi-line layout I think it makes sense to show the description in the same spot. It could possibly be in a p (paragraph) linked to the text input by aria-describedby to indicate it is describing the form field.

[didoesdigital]

It might also be useful with the speak content with words setting too!