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Re: JWAS and special characters pronunciation

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 31, 2013 4:17PM

A crude way to do this is to wrap the character in a <div>.
In very quick testing span does not do the trick (though this is very
brief testing).
This also will require some repositioning with CSS, but this forces
the screen reader (at least Jaws) to read the character by itself.
I would also like to suggest that you add screen reader instructions
to the page, informing the user this article uses a lot of special
charaacters so user needs to make sure the screen reader is set to
pronounce these (for instance, NVDA, ignores most non-alphabet
characters in its default pronounciation setting).
Hope this helps.
Happy 2014
-B

On 12/31/13, Druckman,Geri < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am testing a medically related site about gene mutations. Some of the text
> contains special charters in Greek (e.g., the character Alpha).
> I have added the symbol and the proper pronunciation to the JAWS dictionary,
> I tested it with both character encoding &alpha; and &#945; both work very
> well as an individual character, and JAWS will indeed read "alpha", but when
> it is part of a word it will read it as "ah".
>
> So a gene named p110(enter here a symbol for alpha) will be read as "pe one
> hundred ten ah", though when arrowed through the word it will read "pe one
> one zero alpha".
>
> Any ideas how to encode the page (HTML) in such a way, or make JAWS properly
> read "pe one hundred ten alpha"?
> This will help with other scientific paper (encoded in HTML for online
> reading) that have other special characters.
>
> Thank you, and a Happy New Year!
>
> Geri Druckman
> Web Development Specialist - Accessibility
> Department of Internet Services
> MD Anderson Cancer Center
> T 713-792-6293 | F 713-745-8134
> > > >


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