RE: Getting Screen Readers to Pronounce Acronyms Correctly

As a ridiculously long time screen reader user I'd say don't worry about it and let the screen reader user identify such things in their own way.  Most screen readers have custom pronunciation capabilities, and putting spaces in makes things worse.  You might look at using the acronym tag as it should then spell the acronym.


Allen Hoffman
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From: Mike Elledge [mailto:melledge@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2014 12:22 PM
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: Getting Screen Readers to Pronounce Acronyms Correctly

Hi All--

Ran across this issue recently and wasn't sure how to resolve it. JAWS (may also be true for NVDA) will mis-pronounce acronyms, and I'm wondering how best to address it.

For example, the letters "IT" are pronounced as "it" rather than "eye tee", even if identified as an abbreviation. One way to address this is to put a space between the letters, "I" <space> "T", so that the letters are pronounced separately, however it looks odd visually. Is the only recourse to move the letters together using CSS? Or is there another solution?

Mike