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Thread: how to write Roman numerals please
Number of posts in this thread: 12 (In chronological order)
From: Angela French
Date: Tue, Jan 03 2012 3:09PM
Subject: how to write Roman numerals please
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Could someone please tell me the best practice way for coding roman numerals so that screen readers read the as numbers?
Is using <dfn title="Roman numberal three"> reasonable?
Thank you,
Angela French
Internet Specialist
State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
360-704-4316
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From: Lewis, Sunshine T.
Date: Wed, Jan 04 2012 3:12PM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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I currently use:
<abbr title="Roman numeral four">IV</abbr>
My logic is that "IV" could be considered an abbreviation of "Roman
numeral four" but I've never gotten any feedback as to whether it works
or not. Anyone that wants to take a look can see an example here.
http://www.florida-arts.org/documents/meetingmaterials/cfa.2012-01.agend
a.cfm
.
Secretary of State Kurt Browning is committed to maintaining a high level of service in all areas of the Department of State. If you have feedback on your service, please take the department's Customer Satisfaction Survey. Thank you in advance for your participation.
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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Wed, Jan 04 2012 3:24PM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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2012-01-05 0:12, Lewis, Sunshine T. wrote:
> I currently use:
> <abbr title="Roman numeral four">IV</abbr>
>
> My logic is that "IV" could be considered an abbreviation of "Roman
> numeral four" but I've never gotten any feedback as to whether it works
> or not.
I guess assistive software might treat the title attribute more
seriously when attached to <abbr> than as attached to <span>, which
would be my first choice. Roman numerals aren't really abbreviations,
any more than "4" is an abbreviation of "foure", and there is no
semantic markup for them in HTML. But if there is some evidence that
<abbr> helps, I wouldn't be too picky.
I would however set
abbr { border: none; }
in a stylesheet, to prevent the confusing dotted underline that many
browsers draw under an <abbr> with title attribute.
If I used a title attribute for a Roman numeral, I would use the number
as spelled out, in the form required by the context, e.g. title="the
fourth". Surely we would like an expression like "George IV" to be read
as "George the fourth" rather than "George Roman numeral four", which
might make the listener wonder who George Roman is.
Yucca
From: Jared Smith
Date: Wed, Jan 04 2012 4:03PM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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Roman numerals are no more or less confusing to screen reader users
than they are for other users. There's no necessity to code them so
they are read as numbers in screen readers. If you think they are
generally confusing to everyone, don't use them. Certainly we
shouldn't go about hacking pages so screen readers read things the way
one thinks they should - you'd never be done with this.
With that said, I suppose <abbr> is an acceptable way to go about it.
As Yukka notes, ensure the title attribute contains the text as it
would be read (e.g., Super Bowl <abbr title="46">XLVI</abbr>). Most
screen readers don't do anything special with this unless the default
settings are changed. Again, just using "Super Bowl 46" is easier for
everyone.
Using <dfn> seems like quite a stretch - and I don't think it has any
accessibility support in screen readers, except for VoiceOver which
tends to annoyingly read title on most everything.
Jared
From: Angela French
Date: Wed, Jan 04 2012 4:24PM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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But Jared, if I use "IV" to mean Roman Numeral 4, it is typed on the keyboard with the letters "I" and "V". Isn't it read as that?
Angela French
>
>Roman numerals are no more or less confusing to screen reader users than they
>are for other users. There's no necessity to code them so they are read as
>numbers in screen readers
>
>Jared
>
From: David Ashleydale
Date: Wed, Jan 04 2012 4:30PM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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I think the point Jared is making is that they're seen visually as an "I"
and a "V", too. How does a sighted person know that "IV" means "4"? The
same way a non-sighted person does.
David
On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Angela French < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> But Jared, if I use "IV" to mean Roman Numeral 4, it is typed on the
> keyboard with the letters "I" and "V". Isn't it read as that?
> Angela French
>
> >
> >Roman numerals are no more or less confusing to screen reader users than
> they
> >are for other users. There's no necessity to code them so they are read as
> >numbers in screen readers
> >
> >Jared
> >
From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Wed, Jan 04 2012 4:54PM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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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?
P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
From: Jared Smith
Date: Wed, Jan 04 2012 7:09PM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Patrick H. Lauke < = EMAIL ADDRESS 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?
Most do have settings like this, but I don't think there's a simple
option toggle for reading roman numerals. I think you'd have to set it
up yourself. And there's an awful lot of roman numerals, so that
doesn't help much. You also probably wouldn't want all of them ("I",
"IV", "MIX", etc.) read as numbers rather than letters or words.
Roman numerals aren't really all that common (they were, after all,
pretty much dropped after the "Roman" Empire, except by elitists). I
don't think it's worth any real effort to 'hack' them for screen
reader users.
Jared
From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Thu, Jan 05 2012 1:03AM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 11:54 PM, Patrick H. Lauke
< = EMAIL ADDRESS 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
From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Thu, Jan 05 2012 6:06AM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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I believe that a blind person, like anyone else, can figure out that
"IV" is the Roman Numeral for 4. I've never run across a screen
reader that couldn't read character by character, if the user is confused.
It's very easy to figure out Roman numerals by context, don't you think?
To put my own spin on what Jared suggested already, if everyone tried
to accommodate every quirky pronunciation of each different screen
reader, they'd never get anything done.
It's *SO* important that people who care about accessibility on the
Web focus on what's really important, i.e. accessibility for as many
as possible, rather than weird screen reader pronunciations that
blind people are entirely used to dealing with.
Thanks for your continuing concern about this kind of thing, Angela,
but I'd focus on frying the bigger fish, if I were you.
Jennifer
At 03:22 PM 1/4/2012, you wrote:
>But Jared, if I use "IV" to mean Roman Numeral 4, it is typed on
>the keyboard with the letters "I" and "V". Isn't it read as that?
>Angela French
>
> >
> >Roman numerals are no more or less confusing to screen reader
> users than they
> >are for other users. There's no necessity to code them so they are read as
> >numbers in screen readers
> >
> >Jared
> >
From: Leif Halvard Silli
Date: Thu, Jan 05 2012 6:48AM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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Angela French, Tue, 3 Jan 2012 14:12:22 -0800:
> Could someone please tell me the best practice way for coding roman
> numerals so that screen readers read the as numbers?
> Is using <dfn title="Roman numberal three"> reasonable?
I think that you give too little context for the problem. Do you have
in mind a context where a Roman numeral - e.g. Roman numeral 3 - is
used to distinguish something from 'normal' number 3? If yes, then I
agree that 'Roman numeral 3' seems like a good way to spell it out for
reading. But as others have said, I would then use <abbr> rather than
<dfn>. <dfn> should, according to HTML5, be used only if the paragraph
where <dfn> occurs, is defining what its content - i.e. III - means.
<abbr title="Roman numeral three">III</abbr>
One alternative that hasn't been mentioned is to use an ordered list,
like below. VoiceOver just read the above as it would normally would,
without mentioning that the numbers are Roman, however, which may or
may not be what you want. Code:
<ol type='I'>
<li>This will have Roman numeral one
<li>This will have Roman numeral two
</ol>
As alternative [or expansion of] <abbr>, one could also use an ARIA
attribute. However, VoiceOver's support is lacking, at least on OS X
10.6. Code example:
<span aria-label='Roman numeral 3' >III</span>
Then there is the option of using ruby mark-up:
<ruby><rb>III</rb> <rp>[</rp><rt>Roman numeral
3</rt><rp>]</rp></ruby>
You could add ARIA to the RUBY, like so:
<ruby><rb aria-hidden='true'>III</rb><rp>[</rp>
<rt>Roman numeral 3</rt><rp>]</rp></ruby>
In combination with the above methods, you could use the special
Unicode characters dedicated for Roman numerals - to which degree
screen readers are helped or confused by it, I don't know. But
VoiceOver did not get helped:
<abbr title="Roman numeral 3">Ⅲ</abbr>
Finally, I offer a combination of CSS, ruby mark-up and ARIA attribute,
which actually works as I would like in VoiceOver, with the additional
benefit that it can also help sighted users. I chose to only display
the explaining text only when the user hovers above the numeral.
However, it is a bit complicated and 'involved', so I guess I will hear
lots of critic for that reason ... Explanation: the <rb> element is
made invisible to AT that support ARIA; role=presentation is used to
get rid of VoiceOver's tendency to say 'unknown [element]'. W.r.t. CSS,
then I did not rely on Ruby CSS, but chose to display it as an inline
table.
I present it as a complete HTML document:
<!DOCTYPE html><title>Ruby to rescue</title>
<!--To help IE:--><script>document.createElement("rb")</script>
<style>
rb{text-decoration:underline}
ruby{display:inline-table;vertical-align:bottom;max-width:1em;width:1em;}
ruby:hover rt {background:yellow;font-size:0.5em;}
ruby rt:first-line,
ruby>*:first-child+*:first-line,
ruby>*:first-child+*+*:first-line {letter-spacing:1px;background:orange}
ruby *{border:0;max-width:1em;width:1em;padding:0;}
rb{display:table-cell;}
rp{display:none}
rt{display:table-caption;line-height:0;font-size:0.0em;min-width:12em;font-weight:bold;}
</style></head><body>
<p>With regard to the point at <ruby><rb aria-hidden='true'>IV</rb> <rt
role=presentation>Roman numeral 4</rt></ruby>, then ...
</p></body></html>
With regards,
Leif H Silli
From: Andrews, David B (DEED)
Date: Thu, Jan 05 2012 7:33AM
Subject: Re: how to write Roman numerals please
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How it would be read, by a screen reader depends on the screen reader, specific settings in the screen reader in some instances, and whether or not it is lower case, upper case, or mixed case.
In general, context gives us the clues we need to figure it out.
Dave