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Re: how to get acronyms to not read as words in an altattribute

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: May 8, 2013 2:13PM

Actually in general I don't want something spelled out in all caps to be
broken out into individual letters, since this makes it very difficult to
read sites that include all caps for emphasizing text as mentioned.

However, there are some rare occurrences when it's necessary for absolute
clarity. For example within the last few years, I've had several banking and
and investment companies request this for time sensitive data that had to do
with submitting financial records and investments. They were required by
their legal department to ensure that abbreviated letters for critical
references were explicitly conveyed to all screen reader users to minimize
liability.

In this situation, the method I described earlier, provided a solution for
this problem.

There is nothing wrong with knowing solutions for rare accessibility issues
when applicable.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Olaf Drümmer" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2013 12:50 PM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] how to get acronyms to not read as words in an
altattribute


Once you get into social media, jargon, crowd created content, txtng etc. -
it's becoming pointless altogether to ask for semantically suitable
coding/tagging of text. Admittedly some folks SHOUT all the time. It's up2u
how you handle it but I recommend rather invest in more relevant
accessibility aspects.

These details can more easily be handled by Text to speech algorithms that
take into account dictionaries etc. - and such smarter TTS stuff is
coming... So it's becoming less and less of an issue to do dances around
this kind of stuff. For now, make AT use better heuristics and user
configurable settings, and then over time software will become smarter and
know the difference between "AT" and "@" and "at" also make it
understandable...


Olaf


Am 8 May 2013 um 21:32 schrieb <EMAIL REMOVED> :

> Olaf Drümmer wrote:
>
>> A sequence of uppercase characters (especially a short sequence) hardly
>> ever is to be spoken out as a word (though this does also happen) but as
>> a sequence of separately pronounced characters.
>
> This depends on the type of website. Any social media website,
> for example, needs to grapple with dealing with the ways people
> write text on social media, which often includes sections in all
> caps as a way of providing emphasis or humor. Ultimately, there
> is no way accessible technology will always be able to
> distinguish between the hypothetical "Ohio Hirsute Agoraphobe
> Institute" and somebody who has just greeted you, lolcat style,
> with "OH HAI."
>
> We do the best we can and hope people can figure it out from
> context.
>
> -Deborah Kaplan
> Accessibility Team Co-Lead
> Dreamwidth Studios, LLC
> > >