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Re: weirdness with NVDA reading multidecimal numbers

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 10, 2021 8:09PM

I have not seen that particular instance, but it's a fairly common type of issue. Screen readers use heuristics to try to read numbers appropriately, based on their format, but it is the nature of heuristics that they are not always right. As long as they are mostly right, they are beneficial.

I suspect that NVDA decided that a number format such as 1.2.99 is going to be a date more often that it's going to be anything else. Since it can be other things, such as a paragraph number, then any decision will sometimes be wrong. Would it benefit anyone if they removed the heuristic entirely and just read the numbers and dots?

In order to improve the heuristic, they would need to take account of the context in which the number appears. If it's in the middle of a paragraph, it's almost certainly a date (but maybe not). If it's the very first thing in a paragraph, it could be a date, a paragraph number or something else. See how difficult this gets?

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
Sent: 11 May 2021 01:54
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] weirdness with NVDA reading multidecimal numbers

If you have a number with three parts, such as a success criteria, and the third number is double digit, such as 1.4.10, NVDA seems to think the number is a date, sort of. It thinks the first two numbers are a date and the third number is just a number.

I tried this with html, with and without list structures, and tried it in a word doc both with and without multilevel list formatting, and with a simple text document.

Numbers like 1.2 or 1.2.3 read just fine. In fact, 1.2.X reads fine from
1.2.1 up to 1.2.9. But when the last number goes to double digit, 1.2.10, 1.2.11, all the way up to 1.2.99, NVDA says "January 2nd" and then the third number. When I hit 1.2.100, NVDA is back to announcing all three numbers.

(Note, depending on your locale settings, 1.2.10 might read as January 2nd or it might read as Febuary 1st.)

I think it's a bug in NVDA. Nothing in the settings seems to prevent it.
It's somewhat related to this github issue, but not exactly.

https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/8103

Has anyone else noticed this? It's not a problem with JAWS.