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Re: screen readers and notation for science

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Nov 2, 2015 6:31AM

> My question is regarding screen-reader compatibility for webpages about scientific concepts. Genetics alleles like *Bb*, *bB*, *bb*, and *BB*, or chemical compounds like Pb(NO3)2 could be confusing because the capitalization and parentheses are important for the meaning. Is there anything special I should be doing when putting this type of content on a webpage?

I wish technologies such as Aural CSS were supported by more screen readers other than VoiceOver. This could allow you to indicate how letters and punctuation should be pronounced separately. By adding text like capital it makes the Braille reading experience much less efficient and in some cases and perhaps harder to "visualize". To my knowledge there aren't a lot of great options. Perhaps you could allow the user to toggle that extra information or remove it to help beginning and advanced users.

Jonathan

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Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jessica White
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2015 3:43 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] screen readers and notation for science

Hello,
My question is regarding screen-reader compatibility for webpages about scientific concepts. Genetics alleles like *Bb*, *bB*, *bb*, and *BB*, or chemical compounds like Pb(NO3)2 could be confusing because the capitalization and parentheses are important for the meaning. Is there anything special I should be doing when putting this type of content on a webpage?

If it appears in alt text I could specify the notation in words, "capital B lowercase b", "P b parenthesis N O 3 parenthesis 2", but is that necessary?

And what about when that notation appears in the body of a webpage? .

I know that NVDA has an option to say "cap" or to beep before capital letters, but I can only seem to get that to work when typing, not when reading a page. Also, there will be cases where just saying the chemical name (such as lead nitrate) doesn't convey as much info as the formula, so that's not always an option.