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Re: Accessible GIS coordinates

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Oct 30, 2013 9:46PM

Thanks Olaf and Jared for your comments.

Yes, Unicode characters are an interesting problem. Our firm focuses on
complex, technical publications and periodicals and I'm often stumped why
today's screen reader software doesn't recognize or voice most of the
characters on a font.

I can view thousands of Unicode characters on an OpenType font, such as
Arial Unicode and Myriad Pro, and I can see the name or description for each
character. It's built into the code of the font. Since the data is there, I
wonder why screen readers read this information for some glyphs but not for
the majority.

In these tour books, it sure would improve comprehension for screen reader
users if even "prime" and "double prime" could be voiced. In our tests, the
characters were ignored and the numbers read straight through without a
pause or hint, forcing our testers to reread character by character to
decipher the coordinates. I guess if you read GIS data frequently you'd
figure things out quicker, but these tour books are for the ordinary
traveler who might not be all that familiar with GIS.

If anyone has knowledge as to why most characters aren't voiced by screen
readers, please let us know!

—Bevi Chagnon
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-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Olaf Drümmer
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 7:48 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Accessible GIS coordinates

Hi Bevi,

part of the problem might be that these are not unambiguous… - it could at
least stand for inches or seconds. In other words - double prime can be more
than one thing… As today's screen readers don't do a lot of context analysis
they simply can't figure out whether it's an inch, a second, or what else…
It looks like in this case Unicode did standardise a shape, not a character
with a defined semantic.


Hmm - interesting problem.


Olaf




Am 31 Oct 2013 um 00:22 schrieb Chagnon | PubCom < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> Looking for recommendations on how best to present GIS coordinates in
> a PDF tour book. The tour book has a narrative description of the
> location, along with GIS coordinates.
>
> 2 questions:
>
> 1. The client’s original GIS format is Degrees / Minutes / Seconds.
> Sample: 41° 24' 12.1674", 2° 10' 26.508"
>
> In our screen reader tests, the minutes and seconds aren’t voiced
> regardless of which Unicode character is used — Prime U+2032 or
> U+02B9, and Double-Prime U+2033 or U+02BA.
>
> Is there another symbol for minutes and seconds to use that is voiced
> by screen readers? Is there another way to handle this?
>
> 2. Is there consensus on which GIS format to use? Three sample formats
> follow.
>
> · Decimal degrees: 41.40338, 2.17403
>
> · Degrees, minutes and seconds: 41° 24' 12.1674", 2° 10' 26.508"
>
> · Degrees and decimal minutes: 41 24.2028, 2 10.4418
>
> Thanks all,
>
> —Bevi Chagnon
>
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> www.PubCom.com <http://www.pubcom.com/>; — Trainers, Consultants,
> Designers, Developers.
>
> Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and U.S. Federal Section 508
> Accessibility.
>
> New Sec. 508 Workshop & EPUBs Tour in 2013 — www.Workshop.Pubcom.com
>
>
>
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