WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: funny reading of CAD 1 by NVDA

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Nov 9, 2017 5:15PM

Yes, it's very common. One of my favourites was on the Slack website last year, but sadly it's been replaced. As part of the main heading, JAWS was saying "three hundred million Argentinian Pesos" when there was nothing of the sort on screen. This had me stumped for some time until I turned off styles and saw "300 Mars" on screen - the "300" was something to do with some SVGs that were not visible on screen or in the source code. Basically, JAWS was interpreting the string "300 Mars" as "300M ARS".

The text to speech engines use all sorts of heuristics to identify telephone numbers, dates and other strings so they can read them in an appropriate manner. A lot of the time they get it right, but like any heuristic they can sometimes be wrong.

Steve Green