Re: Help please with tagging acronyms for screenreaders

I agree with Leonie's advice for today's situation.

There is work, however, to provide pronunciation specificity at W3C in
APA's Pronunciation Task Force. If that work pans out, we may have
control not only for screen readers, read aloud AT systems, but also for
mainstream voice data assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Hey Google. You
can track that work here:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/APA/task-forces/pronunciation/


Best,

Janina

Léonie Watson writes:
> 
> On 10/11/2020 14:55, Jenny Norman wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The best thing to do is nothing. Screen readers use the same heuristics as
> humans do to determine how to speak acronyms - and it works.
> 
> If the acronym can be spoken like a word (NATO or WHO for example) it
> generally will be. If it cannot (like USA or HMRC for example) it won't.
> 
> The other thing to bear in mind is that there are just too many variables
> for you to be able to make a screen reader do anything along these lines.
> More on this here:
> https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2017/02/08/advice-for-creating-content-that-works-well-with-screen-readers/
> 
> So your best bet is to write your content and the markup that supports it in
> a way that supports good grammar and leave it at that.
> 
> Léonie.
> 
> 
> > 
> > Any advice appreciated.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > Jenny
> > 
> 
> -- 
> Director @TetraLogical
> https://tetralogical.com

-- 

Janina Sajka
https://linkedin.com/in/jsajka

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup: http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Co-Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

Received on Thursday, 12 November 2020 13:23:48 UTC