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Re: JWAS and special characters pronunciation

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jan 2, 2014 9:39AM

Good points by all.

Sarah wrote: "It might stretch the definition of "abbreviation," but perhaps
you could use ABBR, and have the TITLE spell out the correct pronunciation?
For instance, <abbr title="p 100 alpha"> p110á </abbr>"

Or maybe a new tag where the author can designate how the character should
be pronounced. That could solve these issues:

- Screen reader doesn't recognize the character, doesn't voice it all,
essentially makes it invisible. The new tag could force the screen reader to
voice it.

- Incorrect Unicode character used, such language pi versus mathematical pi.
The new tag would voice it as intended by the author.

- English voicing in a non-English document. The new tag could designate the
correct pronunciation in the document's language, rather than English.

One other factor: we still don't have the tools to do this type of tagging -
not even ABBR - in MS Word, PowerPoint, InDesign and other source documents.
And we also need to have this tag correctly translated into the PDFs
exported from these source programs.

So maybe a new tag like <PRONOUNCE> added to the standard, plus the tools in
authoring programs to apply the tag, and Acrobat retaining and recognizing
the tag would do the trick.

-Bevi Chagnon
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