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Re: Screen readers and telephone numbers

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 4, 2003 9:51AM

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, David R. Stong wrote:

> If you use the letterspacing attribute in a class, with the value set
> at -3pixels, and add aspace between each digit in the phone number,
> the number displays correctly and reads properly.
> Caveat- on my machine.

I'd like to warn against such tricks. Successful at they might be under
some circumstances, they kick back in unexpected ways. And in some
expectable ways, too. If a phone number is written as 5 5 5 9 9 9,
it is natural to read as six completely separate words, and people who see
it may get thoroughly confused. Style sheets are _not_ something to be
relied upon; they are presentational suggestions only, in theory and in
practice. Search engines, for one, will hardly pay attention to style
sheets. (People could actually use search engines to find answers to
questions like "who's got phone number 888 2675", and this would fail even
if the number appears on Web pages but with spaces between digits, making
each digit a separate "word" in the search engine sense.)


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


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