WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

special characters

for

From: Maren Child
Date: Oct 24, 2004 7:59PM

We have quite a lot of special characters in our web documents - en dashes,
em dashes, non-breaking spaces, non-breaking hyphens, etc. The em dashes
(and often the en dashes) have no spaces before and after them. When
converting superscript numbers or letters that are the reference to a
footnote, I put a space or a non-breaking space between the letter/number
and the word before it, so it won't be read out by a screen reader as a
single word. How do screen readers deal with special characters and unspaced
em dashes etc? I use the codes (eg –,  , &#8212, &#8209.)
Maren Child
WordsWorth Writing