Re: alt text & punctuation - best practice?

Phill,

I agree 100+% with your points.  A screen reader is not like you are
listening to the radio and as it becomes more and more like that, a lot of
confusion will ensue when extra punctuation begins to flood the ears.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phill Jenkins" <pjenkins@us.ibm.com>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2004 3:46 PM
Subject: RE: alt text & punctuation - best practice?


Remember that the assistive technology has a responsibility here.  If the
author has marked up the text as a heading <h1> or list item <li>, then it
is the screen reader's job to add pauses, allow the end user to change the
speaking style (i.e., louder for headings), etc.  In fact if we tell
authors to add punctuation, incorrectly, then the screen reader will send
that punctuation to the synthesizer along with it's own punctuation and
you will begin to hear dot, comma, semi-colon, and colon as extra
punctuation.  Look, if the screen reader doesn't pause after headings,
then it is a screen reader problem.  All problems can't be solved by the
author's mark-up or punctuation - that's why there is the User Agent
Accessibility Guidelines [UAAG
http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10/guidelines.html#gl-user-control-styles]

Please, please let's not advocate adding additional punctuation.  Semantic
mark-up is enough.  Remember there is also Aural CSS, even though hardly
anyone supports it.

Regards,
Phill Jenkins

Received on Monday, 21 June 2004 16:04:27 UTC