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Re: US v USA

for

From: Mallory
Date: May 9, 2017 11:53AM

Hi all,
JAWS will read out abbrs, but only if you turn that on (as I have). This
because calendars, ug.

When an SR who doesn't know the abbr sees something that *could* be
pronounced as a word, such as MA (say, for Massachussettes), it'll say
it as a word ("ma" is a valid word). For those it can't see as a word,
like "NV", it'll usually read the letters separately.

Bryan Smart among others have been complaining publicly about
VoiceOver's special terribleness with abbreviations-- apparently, and
without the user being able to change this, it'll substitute what it
thinks are abbreviations with whatever it assumes the full word is. One
example (which I thing Bryan said they've since fixed) was the CO (such
as in "Denver, CO") would always convert to "company". Apparently there
are several of these and most are not fixed nor fixable by users. This
is worse than not saying anything other that the letters on the screen.

The NVDA not exposing (or having that I could find a place to turn on
abbrs) is old and there may already be a bug filed. If not then it would
be great to file one.

Currently on some of our STEM classes we sometimes have some
instructions for students "turn on abbreviations in your screen reader's
settings" (as well as "turn up your verbosity for the following section"
(because mathz)).

cheers
Mallory

On Tue, May 9, 2017, at 05:48 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> Good points.
> Ultimately it comes down to better support for CSS3 speech support:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/
>
> Webpage authors should be able to have some control over how text is
> spoken, just like they have some control over how a page is displayed.
> We don't want to give the authors too much control, because users need
> to be able to override it (just like they can override most CSS style
> seets with their own).
>
>
> On 5/9/17, Graham Armfield < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > This is complicated because some abbreviations are intended to be read out
> > as individual letters - acronyms like BBC - wheres some abbreviations are
> > supposed to read out as a word - example Gen. for General. Additionally,
> > some acronyms are commonly read out as if they were a word - examples UCAS,
> > CAMRA, NASA.
> >
> > We no longer have the <acronym> tag, just the <abbr> element. So getting
> > screen readers to read them out correctly with just the <abbr> tag with the
> > title attribute is a real challenge.
> >
> > Last time I tried the <abbr> tag with NVDA, it didn't give any audible
> > evidence that an abbreviation was present.
> >
> > Regards
> > Graham Armfield
> > > > > > > > > >
>
>
> --
> Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
> > > >