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Re: Screen reader reading words as run-on

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From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: May 3, 2022 12:18AM

We've seen (or heard) this mispronunciation and it's usually caused by one of the following:

— The content creator used a "manual line break" (aka, Shift + Enter) to force text to wrap to the next line without creating a new paragraph or <P> tag. Graphic designers do this often in desktop publishing programs like InDesign. The solutions: avoid forced line breaks within paragraphs by using other methods to wrap the text, or add a spacebar before the line break. They're both hidden characters so designers often don't see this problem in their layouts.

— The content author used an unusual spacebar, such as a non-breaking space (Unicode 00A0), figure space, hair space, thin space, quarter space, third space, punctuation space, or flush space. InDesign is a professional grade typesetting program as well as a design and layout program, so it has many more types of typesetting spaces than other programs. Sometimes these are not translated as normal "spaces" (Unicode 0020) when the PDF is exported or correctly interpreted by the assistive technology. This is a problem that must be addressed by all the players in the accessibility industry.

— For some reason, some OCR software skips the spaces when a scanned document is OCR'd. Very common with Adobe Acrobat's built in OCR utility, but given that this was from Adobe InDesign, there should be no need to OCR anything. Well, unless the designer exported a Press / Print PDF rather than an accessible tagged PDF. In that situation, the remediator might have to run an OCR on the content to make the text live so it can be tagged.

— Sometimes the A T just doesn't acknowledge the space is there. We have no idea why. JAWS and NVDA should process them correctly.

—Bevi

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Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Alan Zaitchik
Sent: Monday, May 2, 2022 6:51 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Screen reader reading words as run-on

Listening to a pdf document using nvda (and then jaws) i hear certain words as “run on”, e.g. the words “in each” are pronounced as if they were one word “ineach”, pronounced as “in-e-ack”. (Jaws handles this example ok but runs on other words.) Looking at the content panel in Acrobat it seems that the words are discrete with white space between them. Neither Acrobat nor PAC3 complain about a missing unicode mapping or anything else.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Alan