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Re: Accessibility of + and -

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Dec 6, 2016 10:00AM

On 06/12/2016 14:00, McGarvey, Paul wrote:
> Is anyone able to offer any thoughts on the accessibility of
> symbols/characters such as &, *, +, - and so on? I know from visiting
> the Digital Accessibility Centre in Neath and speaking to testers
> there that a lot of people who use screenreaders "turn the
> punctuation off" and thus would miss a crucial character in a
> sentence like "exports for this quarter were -0.2". However, want to
> know more about this for looking for any blogs/articles/guidance
> anyone could provide to build on this anecdotal evidence.

Screen readers will use heuristics to try and determine when something
is punctuation and when it's actually a character that needs to be
announced/a modifier. So the "-0.2" should be read out correctly in most
cases (not had a chance to test, but from memory/experience that should
be fine), but if you had "- 0.2" with a space, it likely will not.

If the characters are used as the only visible label for, say, a button,
then you'd probably want to add a very explicit aria-label or similar,
e.g. <button aria-label="Add an item">+</button>. Perhaps even
explicitly hide the character to avoid some double-reading of the label
and the character, e.g. <button aria-label="Add an item"><span
aria-hidden="true">+</span></button>.

Similarly, if you have situations where punctuation characters
absolutely have to be used, but are not correctly announced by AT, you
may want to hide the visible characters / entire section and provide
visually hidden but accessible AT friendly alternatives, e.g. <span
aria-hidden="true">...</span><span class="sr-only">...</span>

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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