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

for

From: Andrews, David B (DEED)
Date: Apr 18, 2018 6:41AM

I think that some os the substitutions come from the text-to-speech engines, so let's be careful with blanket condemnations.

Dave



David Andrews | Chief Technology Officer
Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development
State Services for the Blind
2200 University Ave West, Suite 240, St. Paul MN 55114
Direct: 651-539-2294
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Mallory
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2018 4:34 PM
To: Mohith BP < <EMAIL REMOVED> >; WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Forcing screen reader pronunciation of abbreviation important to a brand

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-h
> iding-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/vi
> > ew?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.
> > > > > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> > > >
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>