WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessible GIS coordinates

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Oct 30, 2013 9:46PM

Thanks Olaf and Jared for your comments.

Yes, Unicode characters are an interesting problem. Our firm focuses on
complex, technical publications and periodicals and I'm often stumped why
today's screen reader software doesn't recognize or voice most of the
characters on a font.

I can view thousands of Unicode characters on an OpenType font, such as
Arial Unicode and Myriad Pro, and I can see the name or description for each
character. It's built into the code of the font. Since the data is there, I
wonder why screen readers read this information for some glyphs but not for
the majority.

In these tour books, it sure would improve comprehension for screen reader
users if even "prime" and "double prime" could be voiced. In our tests, the
characters were ignored and the numbers read straight through without a
pause or hint, forcing our testers to reread character by character to
decipher the coordinates. I guess if you read GIS data frequently you'd
figure things out quicker, but these tour books are for the ordinary
traveler who might not be all that familiar with GIS.

If anyone has knowledge as to why most characters aren't voiced by screen
readers, please let us know!

—Bevi Chagnon
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
www.PubCom.com — Trainers, Consultants, Designers, Developers.
Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and U.S. Federal Section 508
Accessibility.
New Sec. 508 Workshop & EPUBs Tour in 2013 — www.Workshop.Pubcom.com