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JWAS and special characters pronunciation

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From: Druckman,Geri
Date: Jan 29, 2014 11:57AM

Hi Sarah,

First my apologies it took about 3 weeks to test this and actually get
back with you (and all$B!D(B).

The solution you suggested works very well when having screen reader users
in mind. Though we need to remember, that a website is meant to serve all
users, and in this case non-screen reader users that may have styling
disabled, or use an alternative styling sheet. Those users will see "p110$B&A(B
alpha", whereas using the <abbr> tag when styling is disabled, all it will
do is add an underline to the abbreviated word (that line we tried to hide
with styling), but will not affect the content.

Also, in general, a more elegant solution to hide content from browsers
but not A.T., and not just pushing it off the screen, comes from the Yahoo
accessibility team:

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2012/10/clip-your-hidden-content
-for-better-accessibility


.visually-hidden {
position: absolute !important;
clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); /* IE6, IE7 */
clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);
padding:0 !important;
border:0 !important;
height: 1px !important;
width: 1px !important;
overflow: hidden;
}



Geri Druckman

Web Development Specialist - Accessibility
Department of Internet Services
MD Anderson Cancer Center
T 713-792-6293 | F 713-745-8134






On 1/3/14 6:11 AM, " <EMAIL REMOVED> "
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>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 p110$B&A(B, however " $B&A(B " 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.
>
>
>