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Re: Hyphenation best practices

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From: Pratik Patel
Date: Jan 5, 2010 8:27AM

On Jan 5, 2010, at 7:04 AM, Langum, Michael J wrote:

> 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:
> behavior and able to mentally compensate?


> Are there some best practices to suggest to our authors on when to
> uses hyphens without spaces?


This is my personal opinion. But, how a particular screen reader or another
reading software handles punctuation should have no bearing on the
grammatical use of punctuation. If screen readers or synthesizers are not
handling punctuation correctly--and some of them don't, then the burden is
on the manufacturer of that screen reader or synthesizer to fix the problem.
Changing grammatical practices to suit screen reader idiosyncrasies is
problematic at best. While it is wonderful to understand how assistive
technologies behave, we should leave the fixing of these types of problems
to the sources where the problem occurs. There are too many synthesizers to
track and accommodate.

Pratik