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Re: JWAS and special characters pronunciation

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 31, 2013 7:11PM

I totally agree that we cannot always shift all responsibility to the
content developer.The problem with this particular conundrum is that
the screen readers have one set of rules but TTS voices used often
have their own independent rules (painful lesson learnt from working
with developer to design a TTS engine for Icelandic).
What all screen readers should uniformally support is to announce a
character differently when put inside a span, it should not take a
Blockk level element to get that done.
Btw. if you have a copy of an online example, I would happily file a
bug both with Freedom Scientific, makers of Jaws, and NVDA.
What we need to do more of is to alert assistive technology vendors of
issues for end users and content developers, so they are aware of the
problems and have a chance to react to them.
It does not solve the problem for you today, but it could ensure that
next year you and everybody else does not have to invent hacks to get
around them.
Cheers
-B


On 12/31/13, Olaf Drümmer < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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>
>
>
>
> > > >


--
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.