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Re: WCAG 2 draft and abbreviations

for

From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Jun 5, 2007 12:30PM

>Maybe they have. Maybe they just have a vocabulary that says that "US"
in capital >>letters shall be read letter by letter, rather than as the
word "us". Maybe it's a
>program option.

It is both. synthetic speech has such options, exception lists are
vast, and there are lots of rules applied. They don't all get it
perfect.



Allen Hoffman -- <EMAIL REMOVED> ; v: 202-447-0303

-----Original Message-----
From: Jukka K. Korpela [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 2:05 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] WCAG 2 draft and abbreviations

On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Keith Parks wrote:

> But isn't it less a question of the *user* needing additional markup,
> but rather the *machines*, specifically speech synthesizers, needing
> additional information?

Both points are basically fictional.

> For instance, a reader ought to be able to tell, through experience
> and context, that the "US" in US Olympic Team is an abbreviation, to
> be pronounced "you ess". But how does the speech synthesizer know
> this? Do they have that level of logic and interpretation built into
> them?

Maybe they have. Maybe they just have a vocabulary that says that "US"
in capital letters shall be read letter by letter, rather than as the
word "us". Maybe it's a program option.

But how would abbr markup address the issue? Being an abbreviation does
not mean any particular pronunciation. Some abbreviations are read as if
they were words, some are read letter by letter (sometimes by the letter
names of a foreign language), and some are expanded. This may also
depend on style. Besides, if pronunciation were really the issue, why
would you want to indicate specifically the pronunciations of
abbreviations? Special symbols, foreign words, and even common words may
have special pronunciation issues as well.

> It would seem like a structural tag saying that "These letters are not

> an ordinary word, but are to be pronounced as initials" would be
> helpful,

Is it structural? The abbreviation "USA" _means_ pretty much the same,
no matter whether I read it as a word, or pronounce its letters by their
values in my native language, or in English, or some other language, or
spell it out as "United States of America".

If <abbr> were understood in the meaning you suggest, then quite a lot
of <abbr> tags around have the wrong meaning.

If you want markup that indicates pronunciation, it should be
independent of indicating something as an abbreviation. The main problem
with such markup is that few people would use it and few programs would
support it, in a vicious circle.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/