Re: Best practices for screen readers

"Roel Van Gils" <roelvangils@gmail.com> wrote on 06/10/2006 16:54:45:

> Hi Bianca,

> I'm a newbie on this list myself ;)

Me too. We should start a club! ;-)

> > 2. Is there a way to make the screen reader know that a number is a
> > phone number or street address so it reads 2-9-1-6 instead of 2,916?

> I'm not aware of any reliable way to achieve this without adding extra
> (unsemantic) tags. This will probably work, but it's not so pretty.

You can mark up a phone number (indeed, a whole address) using semantic 
hCard microformat markup:

        <http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard>

(Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data 
items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that 
the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched 
for, saved, cross-referenced or combined. More technically, they are items 
of semantic markup, using just standard (X)HTML with a set of common 
class-names. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.)

Hopefully, in time, the authors of screen readers and similar software 
will include recognition of that standard.

There is also a style for aural stylesheets, something like "spell-out", 
but that's not widely supported. I have a reference at home, and will dig 
it out for next week.

-- 
Andy Mabbett
Web Team, Birmingham City Council
http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/
(0121) 303 4885

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Received on Friday, 6 October 2006 16:34:42 UTC