- From: David Poehlman <poehlman1@comcast.net>
- Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 07:43:49 -0400
- To: "John Trollope" <John.Trollope@unumprovident.co.uk>, "'WAI Interest Group'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
No tags exist for this but one thing that might help is aural css. Jaws might be supporting this as it is headed in that direction with its new release due out in october and now in beta three at: http://www.freedomscientific.com if you read the new features you will see that jaws 5.0 has a lot of new things to offer. You also have to take into account that with jaws, you can use many different speech engines and other synthesis devices such as the one I use (accent sa) formerly produced by aicomm corporation which I believe no longer produces it. I use it because it is much les draining on the cpu than is eloquence and when I began my computer journey, there was no software speech. It also does not have the mushy sound that makes software synthesis for the most part difficult to listen to for long periods of time but I digress. One thing you might want to be aware of is that most screen reader users will get used to names that are pronounced differently than they might be pronounced by someone or other synths. When I first began using eloquence on other computers, I actually did not understand some words although they were spoken clearly because of the emphasis placed on different word parts. In the case of Unum, I would not have known how to pronounce it unless I had been told. My last name is garbled by many synths and I have been asked many times how to pronounce it and had to come up with some clever ways to defeat the pronunciation rules of some synths. In short, there is no easy to fix this at present but rather than providing instructions for screen reader users on how to change their screen readers, you might just say that your company name is pronounced as if the words you and num were put together. Num is short for number. Now, if this pronounciation is incorrect, it will illustarate the difference between eloquence and accent. One final thought, to get to the dictionary manager, all you need do is press ins on the number pad together with d. To change the default dictionary if you are not in it, press shift+ctrl+d to open it after pressing num-insert+d. To enhance your jaws using experience, turn off numlock if you have not done so already. Thanks! Dave who is still working as hard as he can to enable technology and to treat its mal-nurished and disabling conditions. ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Trollope" <John.Trollope@unumprovident.co.uk> To: "'WAI Interest Group'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 5:36 AM Subject: Helping Jaws (et al) pronounce our company name I had an ear-opening experience listening to Jaws sputter out the contents of our website. It gave a rather bad rendition of our company name "Unum" which is said "ah-nim", severly clipping the "ah" so that it was more along the lines of "ugh-nm". In Jaws, you can tell it how to pronounce words by going to Utilities | Dictionary manager then clicking on "Add" (the relevant entry for us would be "Unum" for actual word and "you num" for pronounce as). Of course, I am going to propose that we write a page suggesting our users with screen readers to do this for certain company and industry specific words, however, are there any meta tags that Jaws can recognise for this? Ideally, I'd like something like: <meta tag="ScreenReader" ActualWord="unum" ReplacementWord="you num"> Are there any screen readers/ spoken browsers for online content which support something close to this idea? If not, perhaps it's an idea that this list could develop and then promote. Thanks, John John Trollope Senior Analyst Programmer Management Services Unum Provident Milton Court Dorking RH4 3LZ http://www.UnumProvident.co.uk <http://www.unumprovident.co.uk/> +(44) 1306 646 020 john.trollope@UnumProvident.co.uk <mailto:john.trollope@UnumProvident.co.uk> Health Insurance Awards 2002 - voted by Advisers - Most Innovative New Product for Elixia 123 - Best Group Income Protection Provider for an unprecedented fifth year running! Visit our website at http://www.unumprovident.co.uk -----Confidentiality Notice----- This Communication and the information it contains:- (a) Is intended only for the person(s) or organisation(s) named above and for no other person(s) or organisation(s) (b) May be confidential, legally privileged and protected in law. Unauthorised use, copying or disclosure of any of it may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please contact us immediately by email at administrator@unumprovident.co.uk
Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2003 07:43:58 UTC