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Re: JWAS and special characters pronunciation

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From: SaravanaMoorthy.P
Date: Jan 3, 2014 5:11AM

The <abbr> with title attribute will work, however as someone mentioned it's not the default behavior of JAWS and users have to change their settings.
Geri mentioned that the freedom scientific should make this checked by default(read out title) in JAWS; if this had checked then I hope it will read the link text and the title text too(which will frustrates the user; may be because of this reason freedom scientific made this option off by default). Further in some CMS, the title text will be the same as the link text(which will added automatically) and in this case screen reader will pronounce twice the same text.

Note: NVDA by default pronounce "link text" and the "title attribute"

Apart from the <abbr> and other comment floating over here, you can do this too....

<div> p110<span aria-hidden="true">&alpha;</span> <span style="position:absolute; left:-1000px; top;auto">alpha</span> </div>

Here visually it will be p110á, however " á " will be hidden for screen reader users and the off-screen text "alpha" will be pronounced; which is the combination of ARIA & old traditional off-screen technique. The limitation here is the user agents(browser and screen reader) should support ARIA :)
I haven't tested the above approach as I don't have access to screen readers at work. However I hope this will work or someone here can confirm.

Regards,
Saran.