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Forcing screen reader pronunciation of abbreviation important to a brand

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From: JR Accessibility
Date: Apr 13, 2018 7:54AM

Is it possible to force a screen reader to pronounce a two-letter
abbreviation a certain way, rather than the way the screen reader software
wants to pronounce it?

In a previous WebAIM discussion from 2014, Geri Druckman suggested using
the HTML <abbr> tag, but I cannot get that to work.
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?threadb65


For the sake of example suppose my company's name is Nova-Echo but we go by
NE (which should be pronounced 'N E') in our product numbers and in our
preferred customer program, MyNE (which should be pronounced 'My N E').

The default pronunciation of the letters 'N' and 'E' next to each other in
NVDA is 'northeast' and in JAWS it is 'knee'. This leads to undesirable
pronunciations of our product numbers, such as 'northeast 1234' or 'knee
1234', and of our preferred customer program 'my northeast' or 'my knee'.

How can we force the screen readers to pronounce these items the way we
want them to?


I have placed some sample HTML on my Google Drive, that contains additional
examples:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SiAN6ewa70q9L_SqmcxIwIuYQv_mEKRr/view?usp=sharing

Also a spreadsheet with the pronunciations I observed in NVDA and JAWS:
https://drive.google.com/open?idC3RhocHOdtuGJ0uopLfQtGA4EF3pWEusM_ANYQB9Kc

Thank you very much.