If your story has different points of view, is it annoying to switch between them in a single chapter? Thank you!
I do that all the time, so I hope not! lol
seriously, though - as long as the switches are clear and don’t cause confusion you should be fine. I find it helps to use the horizonal rule in between viewpoints to show the flip in perspective.
Note: don’t use stylistic breaks between viewpoints (or scenes) like a series of asterisks or tildes etc. If someone is using a screen reader, it will read out each symbol that you use. Also using indicators like “Character A’s POV” tend to break up the story and take people out the narrative. Or at least they do for me.
Oh my God, please don’t use asterisks as a line break.
“Asteriskasteriskasteriskasteriskasterisk” is the literal worst. As someone who uses almost exclusively screen readers anymore when I read more than a couple paragraphs at a time, I have quit reading stories because there were too many line breaks with a dozen or two asterisks, or OoOoOo, or underscores, or any assortment of characters. It looks pretty, but it doesn’t sound pretty!
Use hyphens or a coded line break. On Ao3, that is done with <hr >. Those just cause brief pauses in the reading, so they are perfect for transitions and breaks between scenes! Listening to a minute straight of “underscore” without pause is grating.
If you use Microsoft word to write, it will check your document for accessibility (meaning, whether a screen reader can read it) for you, and tell you how to fix any problems it finds! On Mac, it’s under Tools > Check for Accessibility and on Windows it’s under File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document > Check for Accessibility
I had no idea about this, that’s really useful. When I’ve got the time I’ll go replace my scene break indicators on AO3. This may take some time, considering how many works I have on there though.
a good “old fashioned” scene break indicator is the asterism (⁂), which is a single symbol, if you want something a little pretty but also accessible