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Re: Screen readers and telephone numbers

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 3, 2003 10:07AM

On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Ian Lloyd (Accessify.com) wrote:

> What is the best way to mark up telephone numbers in
> web pages to aid screen readers pronounce them
> correctly?

I have got the impression that screen readers read digit sequences either
digit by digit or as numbers, and some of them can be controlled by the
user in this respect. Naturally it would be better if documents could have
markup that indicates the logical meaning of a digit sequence (as an
integer or as a code number), and perhaps CSS code that would make
explicit suggestions on the reading style of each sequence. (We can hardly
expect programs to recognize phone numbers automatically.) But in reality,
that's really as futuristic as tel: URLs are.

So actually I don't think any markup or CSS will do any good. Verbal
explanations may. And writing the numbers themselves clearly helps.

Using CCITT/ITU-T E.123 conformant notations helps everyone. They're
standardized, and if programs will start recognizing phone numbers
it would be the first thing to try and cope with the standard notation.
There is a coarse summary of an old version of the E.123recommendation at
http://massis.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/technical/e-series.recommendations

I think the notation should be used without any hyphens or dashes, to
prevent the possibility of misinterpretations (e.g., as expressions with
minus signs). So the notations should be like
Telephone International +358 9 888 2675

> Ideally, we don't really want a six-digit number
> verbalised as "Three hundred and forty eight thousand,
> two hundred and ninety one"!

Quite right, but that's an inconvenience rather than an obstacle. It would
be more serious if there were no apparent audible information that says,
beforehand or even afterwards, that a telephone number is to follow.
(Consider a page where phone numbers are just preceded by images
of a telephone without alt text and could, by their appearance in the
linear reading order, be understand as just some code, or a number.)

From the viewpoint of accessibility in general, I would like to add that
the "Make it Simple: European Guidelines for the Production of
Easy-to-Read Information" document, available in different languages from
http://www.inclusion-europe.org/information/eetr.htm
contains the following recommendations on numbers:

"Numbers
- For dates use the full format 'Saturday, 26 September 1998'.
- Telephone numbers should be separated:
034-22.33.44 or 034-22 33 44
- Always use the numeral and not the equivalent word - even for numbers
below 10. For example 3, 67, 239.
- Never use roman numerals."

http://www.inclusion-europe.org/documents/SAD71EETRFI.pdf#page=17
(Yes, it is in PDF format. How typical. Anyway, it's worth reading.)

I think these particular principles on numbers are, with minor
reservations, applicable to texts in general, not just texts meant to be
easy-to-read in the specialized sense. But I don't think it's a good idea
to use extra hyphens or periods. Spaces are visually distinctive enough,
and even if they might make a screen reader treat the string as a long
number, "minus" and "period" could surely confuse too.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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