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Number of posts in this thread: 19 (In chronological order)

From: Langum, Michael J
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 7:06AM
Subject: Hyphenation best practices
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I'm interested in some feed back (especially from screen reader users) on best practices for hyphenation. Hyphens are sometimes used without surrounding spaces to:

1. combine words into new words: e.g. "blue-collar," "senior-level," etc..
2. connect elements in a series: e.g. "Some places are vulnerable to earthquakes (San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA)"
3. as a form of punctuation (as double hyphens ["--"]) to connect different parts of a sentence (as with a comma): e.g. "He entered the room -- unaware of the danger."

I'm thinking that screen readers would not be able correctly parse these cases, i.e. combining the words in case 1 above, and providing a pause in the case 2 and 3.

Is this true?
Is it a serious problem? Or are screen reader users used to the behavior and able to mentally compensate?
Are there some best practices to suggest to our authors on when to uses hyphens without spaces?

-- Mike

From: Geof Collis
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 7:24AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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Hi Mike

I personally have no problem understanding any of your examples.


cheers

Geof
At 09:04 AM 1/5/2010, you wrote:
>I'm interested in some feed back (especially from screen reader
>users) on best practices for hyphenation. Hyphens are sometimes
>used without surrounding spaces to:
>
> 1. combine words into new words: e.g. "blue-collar," "senior-level," etc..
> 2. connect elements in a series: e.g. "Some places are vulnerable
> to earthquakes (San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA)"
> 3. as a form of punctuation (as double hyphens ["--"]) to connect
> different parts of a sentence (as with a comma): e.g. "He entered
> the room -- unaware of the danger."
>
>I'm thinking that screen readers would not be able correctly parse
>these cases, i.e. combining the words in case 1 above, and
>providing a pause in the case 2 and 3.
>
>Is this true?
>Is it a serious problem? Or are screen reader users used to the
>behavior and able to mentally compensate?
>Are there some best practices to suggest to our authors on when to
>uses hyphens without spaces?
>
>-- Mike
>
>

From: Karlen Communications
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 7:39AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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JAWS is reading all hyphens in the three examples as they should be read.
JAWS says "dash" instead of hyphen but that is just semantics and not a
problem.

What I find annoying is words hyphenated at the end of lines because text
has been fully justified.

Cheers, Karen

From: Randi
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 8:09AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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With voiceover, I have it set not to read punctuation, so I never know
what is being used. With the examples of using hyphens in a sentence,
I hear the smallest of pauses, which helps break things up, but I
can't tell if it's a hyphen or a comma. The same is true with
parenthesis. I've become accustomed to those little pauses and what
they mean. In the case of blue-collar versus blue - collar, there is
also the slightest difference, but the blue - collar with spaces
sounds kinda silly, because Alex really slows down to read it versus
blue-collar with no spaces. I'm really not sure how much of a
difference it might make, and if I'm reading a paragraph, I'm not
going to pay attention to those subtle differences. There have been
times when I've gone in to interact with a sentence to see what
punctuation is there, but it's rare. Don't know if that helps answer
your question.

~Randi

http://raynaadi.blogspot.com/

On Jan 5, 2010, at 7:04 AM, Langum, Michael J wrote:

> I'm interested in some feed back (especially from screen reader
> users) on best practices for hyphenation. Hyphens are sometimes
> used without surrounding spaces to:
>
> 1. combine words into new words: e.g. "blue-collar," "senior-
> level," etc..
> 2. connect elements in a series: e.g. "Some places are vulnerable
> to earthquakes (San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA)"
> 3. as a form of punctuation (as double hyphens ["--"]) to connect
> different parts of a sentence (as with a comma): e.g. "He entered
> the room -- unaware of the danger."
>
> I'm thinking that screen readers would not be able correctly parse
> these cases, i.e. combining the words in case 1 above, and
> providing a pause in the case 2 and 3.
>
> Is this true?
> Is it a serious problem? Or are screen reader users used to the
> behavior and able to mentally compensate?
> Are there some best practices to suggest to our authors on when to
> uses hyphens without spaces?
>
> -- Mike
>
>

From: Moore,Michael (DARS)
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 8:12AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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The punctuation that JAWS will vocalize depends upon verbosity settings for punctuation. The options are none, some, most and all. The hyphen is spoken at the "most" and "all" levels by default. Users can customize vocalization for each symbol as well, the default for a hyphen is "dash" but a user can configure JAWS to say "hyphen" or anything else that they would like.

Mike Moore
(512) 424-4159

From: Karlen Communications
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 8:24AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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Yes, forgot about that...I have JAWS set for most punctuation so I do hear
quotes, hyphens/dashes but not periods or commas unless I go through content
word by word or character by character when editing.

Other screen readers and TTS software may have similar settings depending on
their sophistication.

Cheers, Karen

From: Pratik Patel
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 8:27AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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On Jan 5, 2010, at 7:04 AM, Langum, Michael J wrote:

> I'm interested in some feed back (especially from screen reader
> users) on best practices for hyphenation. Hyphens are sometimes
> used without surrounding spaces to:
> behavior and able to mentally compensate?


> Are there some best practices to suggest to our authors on when to
> uses hyphens without spaces?


This is my personal opinion. But, how a particular screen reader or another
reading software handles punctuation should have no bearing on the
grammatical use of punctuation. If screen readers or synthesizers are not
handling punctuation correctly--and some of them don't, then the burden is
on the manufacturer of that screen reader or synthesizer to fix the problem.
Changing grammatical practices to suit screen reader idiosyncrasies is
problematic at best. While it is wonderful to understand how assistive
technologies behave, we should leave the fixing of these types of problems
to the sources where the problem occurs. There are too many synthesizers to
track and accommodate.

Pratik

From: Jared Smith
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 9:12AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 8:23 AM, Pratik Patel wrote:

> This is my personal opinion.  But, how a particular screen reader or another
> reading software handles punctuation should have no bearing on the
> grammatical use of punctuation.

ABSOLUTELY!!! (I just used all caps and three exclamation marks - none
of which were probably identified by your screen reader. I'm noting
this because I want to make it clear that I *STRONGLY* agree with this
statement.)

As long as web author's properly use punctuation, spelling, semantics,
structure, etc., don't worry about how specific screen readers handle
them, except in the rare cases where doing so might render content
inaccessible (which is different than "reads oddly").

Of note, two of the examples given in the original post are incorrect.
The use of hyphens in "San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA" and "He
entered the room -- unaware of the danger." is incorrect. It should be
en dashes in the former example (San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA)
and an em dash in the latter (He entered the room—unaware of the
danger.). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash for more details.

Screen readers are also incorrect in identifying a hyphen as "dash".
They should ignore hyphens and (if enabled in the preferences)
identify true dashes. The problem is that authors so typically use
hyphens - like this - instead of true dashes — like this.

Jared Smith
WebAIM

From: Karlen Communications
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 9:42AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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agreed

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 10:33AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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Jared Smith wrote:

> As long as web author's properly use punctuation, spelling, semantics,
> structure, etc., don't worry about how specific screen readers handle
> them, except in the rare cases where doing so might render content
> inaccessible (which is different than "reads oddly").

Hyphenation is, indeed, part of orthography, like spelling of words. We
don't misspell words just for the sake of some user agents that might treat
misspelled words better than correctly spelled. Misspelling and wrong
punctuation tends to make texts more difficult to read, sometimes even
ambiguous or incomprehensible.

Accessibility is about being accessible to all, not just those visually
impaired people that use screen readers, constituting less than one percent
of users. In extreme cases, we might distort the content if that's the only
way of making the content accessible at all to such minority groups, though
I still haven't seen such a case.

> The use of hyphens in "San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA" and "He
> entered the room -- unaware of the danger." is incorrect.

Punctuation is strongly language dependent. In particular, many forms of
English use an en dash surrounded by spaces in contexts where to declared an
em dash as the correct punctuation.

> Screen readers are also incorrect in identifying a hyphen as "dash".

No, they aren't. They can do whatever is useful to the human being using
them, for the purpose of understanding the content. Spelling out punctuation
characters can be helpful.

> They should ignore hyphens and (if enabled in the preferences)
> identify true dashes.

There's no big difference. Normally punctuation should be treated as guiding
pronunciation rather than being spelled out as characters, but the user may
occasionally find it useful to hear the character names.

> The problem is that authors so typically use
> hyphens - like this - instead of true dashes — like this.

Using an em dash surrounded by spaces is incorrect according to any English
style guide I ghave read. It used to be correct in some languages that don't
make an essential distinction between an en dash and an em dash, and might
still be. Anyway, this little example just proves that authors often fail to
use punctuation correctly, even if they consciously try to do that. This is
one of the reasons why it can be useful to have punctuation characters read
out.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

From: Jared Smith
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 11:03AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> Screen readers are also incorrect in identifying a hyphen as "dash".
>
> No, they aren't. They can do whatever is useful to the human being using
> them, for the purpose of understanding the content. Spelling out punctuation
> characters can be helpful.

Indeed. I do think they would be better providing a level of
differentiation between hyphens and dashes. Reading a hyphen in
"red-headed" or "co-worker" is unnecessary and extraneous. At the same
time, it could be useful to verify meaning (e.g., "man-eating shark" -
is it a man eating a shark or a shark that eats men?).

Dashes, on the other hand, if used properly, should almost always be
identified. "Working 9–5" or "Pages 3–9" take an entirely different
meaning without the en dash, as do most other cases where dashes are
used. This isn't to mention that the minus sign should be treated
differently as well.

>> The problem is that authors so typically use
>> hyphens - like this - instead of true dashes — like this.
>
> Using an em dash surrounded by spaces is incorrect according to any English
> style guide I ghave read.

And it's correct in others, such many modern newspaper style guides,
such as the New York Times (which allows spaced em dashes to ensure
vertical flow of type - a good reason to allowed or recommended it in
web prose). A spaced en dash is also a suitable replacement in many
style guides and tends to be more commonly used. The point, though, is
that a hyphen is quite different than any type of dash. Granted, we're
really talking about pedantic differences in accessibility here.

Jared

From: Geof Collis
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 11:09AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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I agree with Yucca on this:

Using an em dash surrounded by spaces is incorrect according to any
English guide

not only because of what he's stated but also because JAWS speaks it
as em- not - so it would come out like blue em- collar instead of blue-collar

cheers

Geof

From: Patrick Burke
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 11:27AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
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At 10:03 AM 1/5/2010, Jared Smith wrote:
>This isn't to mention that the minus sign should be treated
>differently as well.

It would be nice if our keyboards had different
keys for hyphen, dash & minus, too. Or if the
print symbols weren't so similar. But, that not
being the case,the lack of clarity will be with us pretty much forever.

Not to mention the beta/ß (sz) and
theta/empty-set confusions, but those are for more specific audiences. :)


Patrick
--
Patrick J. Burke

Coordinator
UCLA Disabilities &
Computing Program

Phone: 310 206-6004
E-mail: burke <at> ucla. edu

From: Jared Smith
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 11:33AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
← Previous message | Next message →

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Geof Collis wrote:
> not only because of what he's stated  but also because JAWS speaks it
> as em- not - so it would come out like  blue em- collar instead of blue-collar

But the use of an em dash, or any dash for that matter, in
"blue-collar" would be very incorrect. The appropriate character is a
hyphen.

Jared

From: ckrugman
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 11:57AM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
← Previous message | Next message →

Screen readers can be set to read punctuation as needed,. There is no need
to use any different punctuation then you would in any regular form of
grammar. As I do frequent editing of documents I want the screen reader to
read all punctuation that exists and I want documents created with correct
grammar and punctuation. Modifying grammatical content and punctuation is
not required to comply and should not be required to comply with web
accessibility for screen readers.
Chuck Krugman, M.S.W., Paralegal
1237 P Street
Fresno ca 93721
559-266-9237
----- Original Message -----
From: "Langum, Michael J" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: "'WebAIM Discussion List'" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 6:04 AM
Subject: [WebAIM] Hyphenation best practices


> I'm interested in some feed back (especially from screen reader users) on
> best practices for hyphenation. Hyphens are sometimes used without
> surrounding spaces to:
>
> 1. combine words into new words: e.g. "blue-collar," "senior-level,"
> etc..
> 2. connect elements in a series: e.g. "Some places are vulnerable to
> earthquakes (San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA)"
> 3. as a form of punctuation (as double hyphens ["--"]) to connect
> different parts of a sentence (as with a comma): e.g. "He entered the
> room -- unaware of the danger."
>
> I'm thinking that screen readers would not be able correctly parse these
> cases, i.e. combining the words in case 1 above, and providing a pause in
> the case 2 and 3.
>
> Is this true?
> Is it a serious problem? Or are screen reader users used to the behavior
> and able to mentally compensate?
> Are there some best practices to suggest to our authors on when to uses
> hyphens without spaces?
>
> -- Mike
>
>

From: Bevi Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 12:06PM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
← Previous message | Next message →

Those of us from the professional publishing world learn the keyboard/ASCII
characters for en-dashes, em-dashes, and other typographic glyphs.

If we want our information correctly interpreted by computers - which
includes screen readers, search engines, and content management systems - we
need to use the correct glyph at the right time.

- hyphen used for hyphenation and compound words, such as
blue-collar worker.

- em-dash (Alt + 0151) used to indicate a break in the sentence
structure, a phrase, or clause.

- en-dash (Alt + 0150) connects a series of numbers, such as
2001-2010, or a compound adjective, such as Monday-Friday sessions.

My company created character charts eons ago that are still valid today.
Download them from our archives at
http://www.pubcom.com/downloads/Character-Chart.pdf

Strict typesetting protocol of yesteryear was to set em-dashes "tight"
without spaces.
But today that rule is loosened; because of a lack of hyphenation on
websites, many style guides and editors allow "spaced" em-dashes so that
HTML text can reflow more easily and keep words visually more readable.

However, I don't believe spaced or tight em-dashes affect 508 accessibility
one iota.

--Bevi
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . .
Bevi Chagnon | = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = | www.PubCom.com
Consultants + Trainers + Designers | for print, web, marketing, Acrobat, &
508
PublishingDC Group Co-Moderator |
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PublishingDC
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .
Sign up for PubCom's Twitter & Facebook pages and get last-minute notices
for class discounts.
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From: Geof Collis
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 12:21PM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
← Previous message | Next message →

But what is a hyphon? Where is it on the keyboard? I was under the
impression that a - was to be used.

cheers

Geof

At 01:33 PM 1/5/2010, you wrote:
>On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Geof Collis wrote:
> > not only because of what he's stated but also because JAWS speaks it
> > as em- not - so it would come out like blue em- collar instead
> of blue-collar
>
>But the use of an em dash, or any dash for that matter, in
>"blue-collar" would be very incorrect. The appropriate character is a
>hyphen.
>
>Jared
>

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 12:45PM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
← Previous message | Next message →

Bevi Chagnon | PubCom wrote:

> Those of us from the professional publishing world learn the
> keyboard/ASCII characters for en-dashes, em-dashes, and other
> typographic glyphs.

Those who know ASCII know that it contains no en dash or em dash, and glyphs
are different from characters. But that's not important right now.

> If we want our information correctly interpreted by computers - which
> includes screen readers, search engines, and content management
> systems - we need to use the correct glyph at the right time.

Correct use of characters is mostly a matter of typographic quality. Search
engines, in particular, tend to ignore all punctuation.

> Strict typesetting protocol of yesteryear was to set em-dashes "tight"
> without spaces.

I think that's still the typographic norm. But I stand corrected: Jared
Smith referred to New York Times practice, and their web site really uses em
dashes with spaces around (which is typographically horrendous, when normal
spaces are used; but I digress).

> But today that rule is loosened; because of a lack of hyphenation on
> websites, many style guides and editors allow "spaced" em-dashes so
> that HTML text can reflow more easily and keep words visually more
> readable.

I don't think it has much to do with HTML. People don't usually use en and
em dashes on web pages.

Interestingly enough, IE 8 treats an em dash as allowing a line break after
it, even in the absence of a space, whereas Firefox 3 treats it as allowing
a line break _before_ it. But this is not much of an accessibility issue.

> However, I don't believe spaced or tight em-dashes affect 508
> accessibility one iota.

Maybe not, but there is a huge difference between "accessibility" and "508
accessibility".

On the other hand, even the accessibility impact is small. It still matters
what people regard as common and normal. This is a moot point: on the Web,
most authors use just hyphens instead of dashes; in quality print media,
most publications use dashes more or less according to typographic norms. So
what do your readers expect to see?

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

From: ckrugman
Date: Tue, Jan 05 2010 1:33PM
Subject: Re: Hyphenation best practices
← Previous message | No next message

This is interesting although I found the format hard to navigate with JAWS
11.
Chuck
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bevi Chagnon | PubCom" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: "'WebAIM Discussion List'" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 11:04 AM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Hyphenation best practices


> Those of us from the professional publishing world learn the
> keyboard/ASCII
> characters for en-dashes, em-dashes, and other typographic glyphs.
>
> If we want our information correctly interpreted by computers - which
> includes screen readers, search engines, and content management systems -
> we
> need to use the correct glyph at the right time.
>
> - hyphen used for hyphenation and compound words, such as
> blue-collar worker.
>
> - em-dash (Alt + 0151) used to indicate a break in the sentence
> structure, a phrase, or clause.
>
> - en-dash (Alt + 0150) connects a series of numbers, such as
> 2001-2010, or a compound adjective, such as Monday-Friday sessions.
>
> My company created character charts eons ago that are still valid today.
> Download them from our archives at
> http://www.pubcom.com/downloads/Character-Chart.pdf
>
> Strict typesetting protocol of yesteryear was to set em-dashes "tight"
> without spaces.
> But today that rule is loosened; because of a lack of hyphenation on
> websites, many style guides and editors allow "spaced" em-dashes so that
> HTML text can reflow more easily and keep words visually more readable.
>
> However, I don't believe spaced or tight em-dashes affect 508
> accessibility
> one iota.
>
> --Bevi
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> .
> . . .
> Bevi Chagnon | = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = | www.PubCom.com
> Consultants + Trainers + Designers | for print, web, marketing, Acrobat, &
> 508
> PublishingDC Group Co-Moderator |
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PublishingDC
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> .
> . .
> Sign up for PubCom's Twitter & Facebook pages and get last-minute notices
> for class discounts.
> www.pubcom.com/twitterface-deals.html
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> .
> . .
>
>
>
>