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Re: The punctuation and typographic symbols that screen readers don't read

for

From: Paul Bohman
Date: Jan 22, 2014 2:53PM

>
> The blog entry title refers to punctuation and typographic symbols, but it
> actually mostly deals with other symbols.


True enough. I tried to come up with a title that was descriptive enough
without being too long. Perhaps I failed at both! Yes, many of the
characters that I tested are symbols and not punctuation per se.

the reasonable fallback behavior is
> usually to pronounce the Unicode name of the character. It is surely
> better to read them that way than just ignore them.


Exactly. It appears that screen readers have decided to ignore nearly every
non-alphanumeric character or symbol, when in fact I think they should do
the complete opposite. Give the name of the character, precisely because it
is a special character that someone put there on purpose to mean something.

Paul Bohman, PhD
Director of Training
Deque Systems, Inc
www.deque.com
703-225-0380, ext.121