RE: Helping Jaws (et al) pronounce our company name

This topic has been discussed without resolution (to my knowledge) by
the WCAG techniques group. Part of the problem is the large additional
markup involved. There was also talk about semantically disambiguating
words using a system like opencyc or wordnet but this just wouldn't work
for several reasons. Perhaps the best solution would be to allow authors
a pronunciation "style sheet" if you will. Each special word of a
document and its phonic description is marked up at the top of the
document, perhaps giving UAs a chance to save pronunciations. This is
still a problem issue since different people pronounce words
differently, and puns and other word play art forms may loose their
subtly. For example WCAG is pronounced "w-kag" by most people who use it
regularly where as most other folks call it "double-u, see, ay, gee". 

Tom Croucher

Co-founder Netalley Networks
(http://www.netalleynetworks.com),
BSc(Hons) Computing Student / Information Services Staff University of
Sunderland
(http://www.sunderland.ac.uk),
Accessibility Co-ordinator Plone CMS
(http://www.plone.org)

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of P.H.Lauke
Sent: 24 September 2003 13:39
To: WAI Interest Group
Subject: RE: Helping Jaws (et al) pronounce our company name


> Generally though, I think I'd prefer the idea of pushing this 
> onto the CSS level.

Couldn't agree more.
On the specific subject of "Unum": being a latin word, would marking
it up as such, with something like <span lang="la">Unum</span>, help
the screenreader along with its pronunciation ?

Slightly off topic, but: phonetically, I think "unum" should actually be
read
out "uh-num", not "you num". Then again, this is a debate I've been
having for ages with some of my english-speaking friends...but it
appears that they always use a very "anglicised" pronunciation, when it
should actually be more closely related to today's neo-latin languages
such
as italian (so "unum" sounding very similar to the italian for one,
"uno").
...but I digress

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2003 09:00:22 UTC