Re: Help please with tagging acronyms for screenreaders

Hello Jenny,

the bad news is that I don't think that advice exists in the way you want  
it.

This is normally something set by screenreader users themselves. SO for  
things they run across frequently they may decide to have <abbr  
title="World Health Organization">WHO</abbr> read as "W H O" or as "who"  
according to what makes sense to them. Likewise, there are default  
settings for unknown terms.

There have been a number of efforts, over several decades, to provide  
authors with a greater ability to *suggest* an appropriate pronunciation,  
including Audio Style Sheets (from last century), SSML (from a couple of  
decades ago, originally developed as part of the work on VoiceXML around  
the turn of the century), and proposals for HTML itself that never got  
traction or browser implementation.

I think the best you can do at the moment in practical terms is mark up  
the abbreviations properly to identify them, trust in the existing  
screenreader implementations to do something sensible with that, and  
engage with the work on HTML, and probably CSS to explain why you want to  
specify a particular type of pronunciation for abbreviations, as a key  
step in working toward improving the possibilities.

cheers

Chaals

On Wed, 11 Nov 2020 01:55:43 +1100, Jenny Norman
<Jenny@thisisfrisson.co.uk> wrote:

> Hoping someone can help - I’ve not had luck finding this on the W3 site  
> / general web / YT etc.
>
> I’m looking for how to correctly tag acronyms so that they are read out
> as single letters by a screen reader, rather than read out in full e.g.  
> WHO UN USA etc.




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Received on Thursday, 12 November 2020 09:02:20 UTC