Re: Brainstorming - abbreviations

T.V Raman wrote
>
>Attempting to bake in pronunciation rules, either by asking the
>Web author to type in some kind of guesed-at pronunciation in the
>markup, or by encoding the abbreviation with a special tag  and
>then baking into screenreaders the pronunciation rules  are both
>approaches that feel extremely flaky.
>

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that pronounciation (let's call this aural presentation) is no different from visual pronouncation, and should be in the CSS. 

I agree 100%, but I think that there are cases where this is problematic.

You also argue that makers of screen readers shouldn't be responsible for lookup tables for pronounciations of common abbreviations. I agree.

So, let me revise my position:

Perhaps the specification should approach this from a user-agent implementation point of view:

Aural user agents should
 (a) implement CSS aural styles (why don't they do this? does anyone know?)
 (b) default to reading the title attributes of abbr elements, rather than the element text content. -- Or -- the css speak property should be given a 'title' value, so in addition to normal - read the text content as word; spell-out - read the text content as intials, there is an option to speak the title attribute

I think those implementations solve a lot of these problems.

Received on Thursday, 15 March 2007 21:55:55 UTC