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Re: Hyphenation best practices

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Jan 5, 2010 9:12AM

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 8:23 AM, Pratik Patel wrote:

> 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.

ABSOLUTELY!!! (I just used all caps and three exclamation marks - none
of which were probably identified by your screen reader. I'm noting
this because I want to make it clear that I *STRONGLY* agree with this
statement.)

As long as web author's properly use punctuation, spelling, semantics,
structure, etc., don't worry about how specific screen readers handle
them, except in the rare cases where doing so might render content
inaccessible (which is different than "reads oddly").

Of note, two of the examples given in the original post are incorrect.
The use of hyphens in "San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA" and "He
entered the room -- unaware of the danger." is incorrect. It should be
en dashes in the former example (San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA)
and an em dash in the latter (He entered the room—unaware of the
danger.). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash for more details.

Screen readers are also incorrect in identifying a hyphen as "dash".
They should ignore hyphens and (if enabled in the preferences)
identify true dashes. The problem is that authors so typically use
hyphens - like this - instead of true dashes — like this.

Jared Smith
WebAIM