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Re: Hyphenation best practices

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jan 5, 2010 10:33AM

Jared Smith wrote:

> 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").

Hyphenation is, indeed, part of orthography, like spelling of words. We
don't misspell words just for the sake of some user agents that might treat
misspelled words better than correctly spelled. Misspelling and wrong
punctuation tends to make texts more difficult to read, sometimes even
ambiguous or incomprehensible.

Accessibility is about being accessible to all, not just those visually
impaired people that use screen readers, constituting less than one percent
of users. In extreme cases, we might distort the content if that's the only
way of making the content accessible at all to such minority groups, though
I still haven't seen such a case.

> The use of hyphens in "San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA" and "He
> entered the room -- unaware of the danger." is incorrect.

Punctuation is strongly language dependent. In particular, many forms of
English use an en dash surrounded by spaces in contexts where to declared an
em dash as the correct punctuation.

> Screen readers are also incorrect in identifying a hyphen as "dash".

No, they aren't. They can do whatever is useful to the human being using
them, for the purpose of understanding the content. Spelling out punctuation
characters can be helpful.

> They should ignore hyphens and (if enabled in the preferences)
> identify true dashes.

There's no big difference. Normally punctuation should be treated as guiding
pronunciation rather than being spelled out as characters, but the user may
occasionally find it useful to hear the character names.

> The problem is that authors so typically use
> hyphens - like this - instead of true dashes — like this.

Using an em dash surrounded by spaces is incorrect according to any English
style guide I ghave read. It used to be correct in some languages that don't
make an essential distinction between an en dash and an em dash, and might
still be. Anyway, this little example just proves that authors often fail to
use punctuation correctly, even if they consciously try to do that. This is
one of the reasons why it can be useful to have punctuation characters read
out.

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