RE: screen reader reporting of negative values

[John wrote]
continue to believe that we, as authors, carry a slightly heavier lift in
ensuring our clients are given the best user experience - this goes beyond
just "letter of the law" accessibility, and into what is the Best
Practice. (And lest anyone think I am being 'condescending' to non-sighted
users here, I believe Best Practices for optimum user experience crosses
all user-groups.)

We do however need to be careful to draw a line between this example that
includes financial data and the too often seen approach that good
intentioned but novice content authors make to fix mispronounced words.
For example, content authors will try to phonetically spell out words or
acronyms in alt text and CSS positioned off-screen text.  When this occurs
the text is not legible in braille, may be targeted to a particular speech
synthesizer, and is plain confusing when read a character at a time.  We
certainly do not want to encourage such a scenario.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: Foliot, John [mailto:john.foliot@chase.com]
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2013 3:45 PM
To: Jennifer Sutton; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: screen reader reporting of negative values

Jennifer Sutton wrote:
>
> I agree with Sailesh:
>
> As I see it, this is where the user has a responsibility as part of
> the :"accessibility contract." If you're looking at your finances,
> even if you don't know how to adjust your screen reader's verbosity,
> you better darned sure know how to navigate character by character to
> check for minus signs (not to mention being careful to check for
> correct reporting of numbers, if you suspect something is amiss). As
> far as I know, examining character by character *should* report *all*
> characters regardless of punctuation settings, at least in my
> experience of some, but not all, screen readers.

I principle, I agree, but with the following provisions:

1) As part of the "accessibility contract" authors must ensure that
content is Perceivable and Understandable, thus this *is* an author issue
(Sailesh feels otherwise).

2) There are multiple ways of visually rendering "a minus symbol" on
screen, as Roger noted in his initial post:

> I am interested in finding the best way to include negative values in
> a table. For example a table showing an overdrawn bank account or a
> temperature below zero (c or f).
>
> It seems that there is some variability in the level of screen reader
> (and/or browser) support for coded — and — or the standard
> keyboard dash.

I believe that it is important that authors understand which of those ways
works versus which introduces confusion, etc.

I continue to believe that we, as authors, carry a slightly heavier lift
in ensuring our clients are given the best user experience - this goes
beyond just "letter of the law" accessibility, and into what is the Best
Practice. (And lest anyone think I am being 'condescending' to non-sighted
users here, I believe Best Practices for optimum user experience crosses
all user-groups.)

JF

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Received on Monday, 19 August 2013 22:20:57 UTC