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Re: JWAS and special characters pronunciation

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jan 1, 2014 5:44PM

Birkir wrote:
" What all screen readers should uniformly support is to announce a character differently when put inside a span, it should not take a Block level element to get that done. "

Whatever solution is developed by the industry, it needs to also work for non-HTML documents, such as MS Word, PowerPoint, and Acrobat PDFs.

Right now, putting a span tag requires hand-tooling in the resulting PDF file, not a very efficient method for the millions (and probably billions) of ordinary documents created every day. The native Word and PowerPoint files need to be just as accessible as the PDF exported from them, as well as their HTML counterparts.

1) We need to broaden our focus: all information should be accessible, not just HTML websites, and we need to encourage the key players (which are the AT manufacturers, Microsoft, and Adobe) to develop solutions that will work for HTML, Word, PDF, ePUBs and forthcoming technologies. Hand-coding a span tag around these elements won't get done by ordinary workers who create the majority of documents.

2) We also need to use Unicode to its full capabilities for these characters.

There are different Unicode characters for the Greek letter pi used in written material (Unicode 03C0) versus the mathematical symbol pi used in formulae (Unicode 03D6), although both appear visually the same to the human eye.

Similar for all sorts of dashes; the hyphen has about 12 variations but the normal hyphen is Unicode 2010, the mathematical minus sign Unicode 2212, the en-dash is Unicode 2013, and the em-dash is Unicode 2014. Each of these glyphs has a different purpose in language and technical documents.

It would help if we and the industry could develop standards for how these variations will be voiced and treated by AT. One solution is for screen readers to pick up the Unicode name from the character when they encounter it.

In a series of technical documents we just completed for a client, plus and minus signs peppered the narrative, as in "adults 21+" and "a co-efficient of −.125". Our screen reader testers didn't even know that the characters were there and so they misread a great deal of the information in the documents. AT users shouldn't have to play mindreader and figure out that they have to force their technology to voice individual characters: instead, we the document creators, need a way to signal all technologies to voice the character with its Unicode name.

And that has to be done in the source document, such as MS Word, Adobe InDesign, and an HTML editor.

—Bevi Chagnon

— PubCom.com — Trainers, Consultants, Designers, and Developers.
— Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and U.S. Federal Section 508 Accessibility.