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Re: how to write Roman numerals please

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Jan 5, 2012 1:03AM

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 11:54 PM, Patrick H. Lauke
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> It's been a while since I touched a screen reader, but: don't some of
> them also have internal lists/heuristics to help read out common things
> like roman numerals? As a user setting?

FWIW by default VoiceOver appears to recognise I to L *exclusive* as
Roman numerals. I is read as "eye". "III" is read as "three. "Henry
III" is read as "Henry the Third". "L" is read as "el". "LII" is read
as "el eye eye". There are no special settings for this, although
VoiceOver does allow you to override prononciation of any particular
sequence of characters.

There are various ways we could add semantics for expressing
pronunciations in HTML, but nothing conclusive and in any case there's
no implementation support in popular AT.

On the whole, it's arguably more efficient for us to work on improving
natural language processing by text-to-speech agents than marking up
individual Roman numerals, as most of them will remain unmarked and AT
will need to deal with that content too.

For example, VoiceOver could be improved to distinguish between the
two Is in "I read about Henry I" and to understand numerals L and
higher.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis