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Re: weirdness with NVDA reading multidecimal numbers

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From: Mallory
Date: May 11, 2021 12:55AM

I would feel better if the text that's visible was the text read out, but that's me.
I don't want to be in an address with "CO" in it and some speech engine says "Company", or says "Doctor" for "Dr" when it has no way of knowing this is "1564 Foobar Dr, Boulder CO" or "Foobar Co, Attn Dr Foo, cat dentist extraordinaire".

Sighties see only the Attn, the Dr, the CO, and they use human brains to determine the context, which I think gives them a leg up on non-Braille screen-reader users who have to go manually spell shizzle every time they hear something which might sound weird.
But many SRs esp NVDA listen to their users, and it's possible they do this because more users liked it than hated it. This is certainly the case with some other SRs like Orca.

cheers,
_mallory

On Tue, May 11, 2021, at 4:09 AM, Steve Green wrote:
> 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
>
>
>