Why history teaches us that hashtags aren't actually better in camel case

Let’s start with a confession: I am a typographic pedant, and there is a very specific, deeply well-intentioned mistake sweeping through the digital accessibility community that is driving me absolutely mad.

Every day, brilliant accessibility advocates, social media managers, and disability organisations post the exact same advice:

"To make your hashtags accessible to screen readers, please write them in camel case!"

Here is the problem: They almost never mean camel case. They mean PascalCase.

Yes, it is a microscopic technicality and the term is deemed interchangeable. But as anyone who has ever spent three hours adjusting the spacing between a capital "A" and a lowercase "v" will tell you, microscopic technicalities are where readability lives or dies. Just ask CLINT EASTWOOD about bad kerning.

If you are a programmer, you’re probably nodding in painful agreement — you’ve likely had a codebase break because of a casing mix-up. But if you look at what designers and typographers obsess over daily — things like perfect kerning, visual hierarchy, and making the formatting so clean that it becomes invisible — you realise that developers and designers are actually fighting the exact same battle.

For decades, these two groups have operated in separate silos. Yet, they have both been running parallel experiments in cognitive accessibility, trying to solve the exact same problem: how do we present text in a way that allows the human brain to decode it with the absolute minimum amount of friction?

Which brings us to the humble world of text casing and the surprisingly rich history behind how we glue words together.

The typographic battle for "word shapes"

To understand why text casing matters, we have to look at how humans physically read.

When you read a line of text, your brain doesn't actually process letters one by one. Instead, it recognises the overall silhouette or outline of a word.

For decades, typographers have referred to this silhouette as a "Bouma shape". The term was named after Herman Bouma, a pioneering Dutch vision researcher who published landmark papers in the 1970s on how the human eye recognises letters and word boundaries. Bouma studied the visual confusability of letter strings, showing that our peripheral vision relies heavily on the envelope or outer contour of a word.

These silhouettes are created by the height differences between upper and lowercase letter, as well as ascenders (like b, d, h, t) and descenders (like g, j, p, q).

When we write standard sentences, spaces do the heavy lifting. But the internet frequently robs us of spaces. We see it in code variables, URLs, and social media hashtags.

When you strip out the spaces and write in all lowercase:

userprofilephotoupload 

You completely flatten the Bouma shapes. The brain can no longer read the shape boundaries. It is forced to stop and decode the letters one by one to make sense of where one word ends and the next begins.

PascalCase is not just for assistive technology

While screen readers (software used by blind and visually impaired users) absolutely require capitalised spacing to distinguish and vocalise individual words, the benefits of casing extend far wider than just code or specialised software.

According to the British Dyslexia Association, an estimated 10% of the population is affected by dyslexia (over 6 million people in the UK alone). For dyslexic readers, a common barrier is visual crowding — where tight, unspaced lowercase characters appear to merge, rotate, or blur together.

By applying PascalCase (UserProfilePhotoUpload), we introduce high-contrast visual anchors. The capital letter at the start of every word acts as an instantaneous punctuation mark for the brain. It reduces cognitive fatigue and makes text accessible to millions of neurodivergent visual readers, not just screen reader users.

The great "camel" vs. "pascal" mix-up

This bringing-together of accessibility and typography isn’t just an abstract debate; it plays out daily on our social feeds.

A fantastic case in point is the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). They do incredible, vital advocacy work teaching creators how to make the internet more inclusive. Yet, even in their brilliant, highly shared social media accessibility guides and their recent, very creative, hashtag LinkedIn campaign they gently instruct users to "use CamelCase".

It is important to note that the RNIB — and indeed most other accessibility advocates preaching this advice — actually do use the correct PascalCase format in all of their written examples and images. Their execution is absolutely flawless; it is simply the naming terminology that has got mixed up over time.

Because technically:

• camelCase  =  userProfilePhotoUpload  (First letter lowercase, humps in the middle)
• PascalCase =  UserProfilePhotoUpload  (Every word capitalised, including the first)

For screen readers, the distinction doesn't strictly matter. They use a process called "tokenisation" — scanning the text for any capital letter to split the conjoined string into spoken words. So, a screen reader will read both camelCase and PascalCase aloud correctly.

But for human eyes, PascalCase is the winner. Placing a capital letter directly next to the # symbol creates a clean, uniform visual boundary.

Take one of the internet's most legendary, accidental hashtag fumbles: #SusanAlbumParty.

Without any spaces, the lowercased #susanalbumparty completely flattens the word boundaries, causing the human brain to decode the letters in an unfortunate, alternative way.

By utilising PascalCase (#SusanAlbumParty), we establish clear typographic boundaries. The screen reader can parse the capitalised tokens to speak the words correctly, and the human eye instantly avoids a public relations disaster.

The backstory: who is Pascal?

While early programmers used medial capitals for decades, the term PascalCase was coined by Microsoft engineers around 1999 during the creation of the .NET framework.

They named it after the Pascal programming language, which was designed by Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth in 1970. Early Pascal developers voluntarily capitalised their variables to make them readable in a language that was case-insensitive.

But the physical writing style goes back even further. The earliest systematic use of capitalising joined words was actually invented by Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius in 1813 as a way to write chemical formulas (think H₂O or NaCl). Who knew?

The casing menagerie: snakes, kebabs, and trains

As the internet evolved, developers and designers started naming these casing styles after food and animals. While the styles are old, the names were mostly coined by programmers on forums in the early 2010s:

• kebab-case (susan-album-party): The lowercase words are the chunks of food, and the hyphen (-) is the metal skewer piercing right through them. Popularised by JavaScript libraries in 2012, it is the undisputed king of web URLs and CSS properties (i.e. font-size).
• snake_case (susan_album_party): Coined by a Ruby developer in 2004, the words slither low along the baseline, separated by underscores.
• SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE (SUSAN_ALBUM_PARTY): Used in programming for constant values that never change. It literally looks like a snake shouting at you.
• Train-Case (Susan-Album-Party): Like PascalCase, but connected by hyphens. The capitals stick up like train cars, and the hyphens are the couplers holding them together.

The dark history of lowercase regret

If you still think choosing the right casing style is a pedantic technicality, allow us to take a quick trip down memory lane to the early 2000s.

When the World Wide Web was new, domain names didn't support spaces, and capitalisation was entirely ignored by browsers. This resulted in some of the most legendary, accidental, and highly inappropriate branding disasters in human history:

• penisland.net (Pen Island — a completely innocent custom pen-making website that unfortunately reads as Penis Land).
• expertsexchange.com (Experts Exchange — a technical Q&A forum that rapidly purchased experts-exchange.com after realising everyone read it as Expert Sex Change).
• therapistfinder.com (Therapist Finder — I’ll let you work this one out).
• molestationnursery.com (Mole Station Nursery — a lovely, completely innocent native plant nursery in Australia that became an overnight viral sensation for all the wrong reasons).
• speedofart.com (Speed of Art — an art collective that inadvertently branded themselves as Speedo Fart).

A well-placed kebab-case hyphen would have saved these companies millions of pounds in rebranding and PR clean-ups.

We are all fighting the same battle

Whether you are a developer writing clean C# code, a typographer setting a layout, or a social media manager posting a hashtag, the lesson is the same: Empathy for the reader is our ultimate job.

While camelCase is enough to satisfy the technical requirements of screen readers, choosing PascalCase is the way to go. By capitalising that very first letter, we preserve the overall visual silhouette of the conjoined words. This small, extra effort makes the text exponentially easier to parse for people with dyslexia, reading difficulties, cognitive strain, or even just tired eyes scrolling through a feed in a hurry.

Keep your humps up, your skewers straight, and let’s keep the internet accessible for everyone.

References & further reading

1. Dyslexia statistics & cognitive impact:
   1. British Dyslexia Association (BDA). It is estimated that 10% of the UK population (roughly 6.3 million people) have dyslexia. Learn more at the British Dyslexia Association Factsheet.
   2. The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. Dyslexia affects 20 percent of the population globally and represents 80–90 percent of all those with learning disabilities. Read the details via The Yale Center for Dyslexia FAQ.
2. Herman Bouma & word shape theory:
   1. Bouma, H. (1973). Visual interference in the parafoveal recognition of initial and final letters of words. Vision Research, 13(4), 767-782. View the academic entry on PubMed (PMID: 4706350).
   2. Saenger, P. (1997). Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford University Press. Explore the book's thesis via Stanford University Press.
3. Niklaus Wirth & Pascal programming language:
   1. Wirth, N. (1971). The programming language Pascal. Acta Informatica, 1(1), 35-63. Learn about Niklaus Wirth's structural design philosophies through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library.
4. Jacob Berzelius & chemical notation:
   1. Berzelius, J. J. (1813). On the chemical signs, and the method of employing them to express chemical proportions. Annals of Philosophy. Read about his groundbreaking chemical naming system at the Encyclopædia Britannica Biography of Jöns Jacob Berzelius.

This video introduction to the Pascal programming language offers an excellent audiovisual history of Niklaus Wirth's structured coding creation and the technical choices that went into it.