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Re: Forcing screen reader pronunciation of abbreviation important to a brand

for

From: Mallory
Date: Apr 17, 2018 3:34PM

I find it personally disingenuous that screen reader software substitutes almost random words for letters. Sighted people aren't given this-- they see CO and use the context to mentally call that "country", "colorado", "company" or something else. Imagine if browsers changed those visually to the other words-- users would be up in arms and not everyone can or will always realise they're hearing some SR BS rather than the actual content.

It's kinda like translators taking "rays of light" coming out of Moses' head and translating it to "horns" and then you get weird-looking statues.

I get the danger of web devs doing a bunch of hacks to force any pronunciation, and tend to recommend they don't do it, but giving people clearly-wrong data can't ever be good.

cheers,
_mallory

On Tue, Apr 17, 2018, at 7:32 AM, Mohith BP wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The solution for your issue is:
> 1. Hide the visible text from the screen readers by providing a span
> around the text with the aria-hidden="true"
> 2. Provide visually hidden text in the same place.
>
> Please refer the following article and there are couple of ways to
> hide the text visually through CSS.
> https://adaptivethemes.com/using-css-clip-as-an-accessible-method-of-hiding-content
>
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> Mohith B. P.
> On 4/13/18, JR Accessibility < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > 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.
> > > > > > > > > >
> > > >