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Re: Forcing screen reader pronunciation of abbreviationimportant to a brand

for

From: JP Jamous
Date: Apr 13, 2018 9:53AM

You can accomplish this by various ways. It depends on the situation you have at hand. The bottom line is you use ARIA to hijack the HTML element. It may not be the best method from a semantic prospective, but it gets the job done.

For example if I have a paragraph:

<p>
You have purchased NE1254 for $300.
</p>
You can hijack NE1254 using ARIA.

<p>
You have purchased
<span aria-label=" N E 1254">
NE1254</span>
for $300.
</p>

I hope that helps.

--------------------
JP Jamous
Senior Digital Accessibility Engineer
E-Mail Me |Join My LinkedIn Network
--------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of JR Accessibility
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2018 8:55 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Forcing screen reader pronunciation of abbreviation important to a brand

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.