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From: David Lund
Date: Thu, May 11 2000 12:40PM
Subject: Audio Web Browsers
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Hello,
I am working on the web site for the University of Utah Testing Center. I
am attempting to make our site accessible to individuals with disabilities.
As part of this effort, I have some questions:
Do audio browsers read "ACT" as "A.C.T." or as "act?"
How about acronyms that do not form proper English words such as "GMAT?"
Do I need to put periods after each letter of an acronym for it to be read
properly?
Is capitalizing each letter enough for the browser to know it is an acronym?
If you could help me with these questions, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you very much,
David Lund

From: Paul Bohman
Date: Thu, May 11 2000 12:50PM
Subject: RE: Audio Web Browsers
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Hello, David
You wrote:
>>Do audio browsers read "ACT" as "A.C.T." or as "act?"
How about acronyms that do not form proper English words such as "GMAT?"
Do I need to put periods after each letter of an acronym for it to be read
properly?
Is capitalizing each letter enough for the browser to know it is an acronym
Not every text-to-speech program is the same. For the most part, they try to
pronounce acronyms as best they can, especially if the word "appears" to be
pronounceable. You can be confident that ACT will be pronounced as "act." If
you type A.C.T. then some screen readers say "Ay, see, tee" while others say
"Ay, dot, see, dot, tee, period" or something similar. By putting periods in
between the letters, you tell the screen reader to break up the
pronunciation.
For acronyms such as "GMAT", screen readers will be less sure of what to do.
Some will pronounce each letter, while others will make an attempt at
pronouncing it phonetically. The results of such attempts are questionable
at times.
There is an HTML tag that can be used:
<acronym title="United States of America">USA</acronym> (or you might want
to write U.S.A. with periods)
Some screen readers recognize this tag and actually read the expanded
version. Internet Explorer also has a tool tip "popup" for the acronym tag
that you can see when you mouse over it.
Capitalizing words does not automatically designate it as an acronym.
Hope this helps.
Paul Bohman