WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: soft hyphens hard coded

for

From: Mallory
Date: Jan 12, 2021 8:42AM


If you want people to know how to pronounce things, you don't hide the hyphen and don't use &shy.

You use a real hyphen, so people with disabilities but no screen readers have equal access. Why should only those with speech synthesisers benefit? And should makers of things like TextHelp or other reading-assistance text-to-speech softwares implement a pause where hyphens are?

cheers,
Mallory

On Tue, Jan 12, 2021, at 4:16 PM, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> Hi Patrick and all,
>
> If shy is used exclusively for meaningful hyphenation off
> auto-hyphenation, it would also help to realize SC 3.1.6., I'd suppose.
> I don't find a restriction for only *visual* usage of shy here:
> https://unicode.org/reports/tr14/#SoftHyphen
> Do you have any references for not to use shy for aural issues like in
> pronunciation?
>
> It is a hack but is it also a possible mechanism for SC 3.1.6?
> I looked it up and found that shy is not mentioned in the
> understanding-article for 3.1.6:
> https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/meaning-pronunciation.html
>
> But again, if shy were used exclusively for meaningful hyphenation off
> auto-hyphenation, it would also help to realize 3.1.6., I'd suppose.
> Two flies at once: meaningful visual hyphenation and pronunciation.
>
> Wolfgang
>
>