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Re: Large numbers and currency symbols in screen readers

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: May 6, 2009 2:45PM

Jared Smith wrote:

> I'd almost universally recommend presenting the alt text in the same
> format it is presented visually.

I'd almost universally recommend just the opposite: forget the visual
presentation, since you are primarily dealing with something to be presented
to people who cannot see the image. Hence, you should first think of aural
rendering. It is true that in some modes of browsing, it is nice to have a
compact textual presentation. But there is a difference between necessity
and niceness.

> If the image displays "$508M" then
> the alt text should be "$508M". If sighted users are expected to know
> what "$508M" is, why expect something less from users just because
> they don't happen to use a screen reader?

Partly because they might not be familiar with such notations, as they don't
read newspapers etc. the same way as sighted people so often do; partly
because the software they use might, for all that we can know, render the
notation in some clumsy or even cryptic way.

So I would say that the best alt text would be "five hundred and eight
million dollars". Then it does not matter how the software handles digits
and special notations.

I don't expect authors to take trouble as a rule, though.

But I wonder why one would use an image to represent text like "$508M". This
is the crucial question.

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