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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