WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Hyphenation best practices

for

From: Langum, Michael J
Date: Jan 5, 2010 7:06AM

I'm interested in some feed back (especially from screen reader users) on best practices for hyphenation. Hyphens are sometimes used without surrounding spaces to:

1. combine words into new words: e.g. "blue-collar," "senior-level," etc..
2. connect elements in a series: e.g. "Some places are vulnerable to earthquakes (San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA)"
3. as a form of punctuation (as double hyphens ["--"]) to connect different parts of a sentence (as with a comma): e.g. "He entered the room -- unaware of the danger."

I'm thinking that screen readers would not be able correctly parse these cases, i.e. combining the words in case 1 above, and providing a pause in the case 2 and 3.

Is this true?
Is it a serious problem? Or are screen reader users used to the behavior and able to mentally compensate?
Are there some best practices to suggest to our authors on when to uses hyphens without spaces?

-- Mike