WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: JWAS and special characters pronunciation

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Dec 31, 2013 4:47PM

Wouldn't inserting a zero width space do the trick? Though strictly speaking it is breaking the one word into two words though they still look like one to the sighted user (but be also aware that searching for the one word might begin to fail...).

In general I would like to add that it is more important to fix less than well working tools instead of hacking around in content to avoid limitations of one out of many tools. But that's just my personal point of view…

Olaf



Am 1 Jan 2014 um 00:17 schrieb "Birkir R. Gunnarsson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> 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
>> >> >> >>
>
>
> --
> Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
> > > ---
Olaf Drümmer
Florastraße 37
13187 Berlin
Tel 030.42022239
Fax 030.42022240
<EMAIL REMOVED>