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Screen reader accessibility to Uncertain Character Format

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From: Pat Reynolds
Date: Jul 5, 2020 9:19AM

Hello all,

I work for FreeUKGenealogy, a UK charity that is transcribing, and
making freely available to all, historic documents of interest to
family historians.

One of the problems our volunteer transcribers have is that
handwriting in the past can be a bit dodgy, and the documents can be
affected by damp, rodents, etc, all making for some characters and
words to become illegible.

To give our users the best chance of understanding what the
transcriber is seeing, we use something called 'uncertain character
format' (UCF) - the following link will take you to the instructions
for transcribers -
https://www.freereg.org.uk/cms/information-for-transcribers/dealing-with-uncertainty#ucf
The method uses square brackets, underscores, and asterisks to convey
what might be there. And the following link will take you to the help
page for users https://www.freereg.org.uk/cms/help#ucf.

Here is an example of a search result where the record found which has
the UCF displayed:
https://www.freereg.org.uk/search_queries/5f01ef1cf493fdd3707c113e?locale=en

I'm assuming that those who use screen readers will find this
difficult to use, and wonder how we can make this as accessible as
possible for you. Since these users are dependent on the
transcriptions, which are sometimes less complete or of poorer quality
on sites that allow the user to see the original, it is important to
us that we get this right.

With thanks for any help you can give, and best wishes,

Pat



--
- -
Dr Pat Reynolds
Executive Director


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