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soft hyphens hard coded

for

From: wolfgang.berndorfer@zweiterblick.at
Date: Jan 11, 2021 12:37PM

Is hyphenation underestimated in the WAI?

Sorry, but I must get verbose to describe the background:



UAAG 2.0 1.4.6 is only AAA and passes as soon as it's possible to use
stylesheets. Correct? So, every HTML-page passes the SC.

WCAG don't deal hyphenation at all yet and in 2.2. I just found a discussion
in the LVWG from 2016, which faded out soon.



Problem:



*­* determines in HTML a potential visual break at the LINE END and an
interruption in speech synthesizers on EACH instance.

The aural interruptions can be annoying or even cause incomprehensibility.
These problems where lately discussed in the German JAWS mailing list.



The problem occurs when shy is hard coded extensively. Seems, there are
tools used for such hard coding hyphenation in German texts.



Needs for SCs:



If browsers were advised to implement language appropriate hyphenation in
UAAG, no further extensive hard coding hyphenation would be necessary and
could be deprecated. (good for TTS)

The shy-element could be strictly reduced to distinguish between differences
in meaning and pronunciation. As e.g., in German "Brautraum" can mean
Brau-traum (brewing dream) and Braut-raum (bride room).



Then the CSS hyphens values could be applied more effectively:

*none* for texts easy to be read.

*manual* for SR.

*auto* for small devices.



And there could be a SC 3.1.xx, which encourages to offer settings between
hyphenation auto | manual | none.



What do you think? I ask the WebAIM-group and not the WAI interest group,
because here is the broader community with more SR users, I suppose.



Wolfgang