On 11 May 2007, at 13:10:28, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't see that this should be the case. For example, "Ltd" is a
common UK abbreviation for the word "Limited" in the context of a
"Limited Liability Company", such as "HyperGlobalMegaCorp Ltd."
Another example would be "Mr", which is an abbreviation of "Mister."
There are plenty more examples - in French, "Mlle" is an
abbreviation
of "Mademoiselle".
How would you expect a screen reader to speak these groups of
characters? (Regardless of what tag they appear in.)
I would certainly not expect an English-language based reader to
keep a
list of abreviations of all other foreign languages, so while a
sighted
user _may_ recognise Mlle and speak it out loud (I wouldn't - never
learnt any French at school, fortunatly) it seems a very long leap
for a
screen reader.
Regards,
Mike
Tricky one :-)
I'm not sure whether screen readers have dictionaries of common
abbreviations, although it appears that sometimes, even if they did,
the Microsoft APIs would muck things up for them:
<http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_support/BulletinView.cfm?QC=511>
but, as that article shows, they - or at least Jaws, and I believe
SuperNova - do allow for custom dictionaries; maybe a community
effort could compile useful collections of such abbreviations for
users to download.
As far as the case of something like "Mlle." is concerned, I would
expect to mark it up as follows:
<abbr lang="fr" title="Mademoiselle">Mlle.</abbr>
and I think one could argue (contrary to my earlier assertion) that,
in this kind of case, the abbreviation should be marked up using
<abbr> for every occurrence, as that would hopefully allow screen
reader users a seamless listening experience.
Once again, it looks like there are no hard and fast rules about how
to handle these matters. Ah well, having to think about it is what
makes it fun :-)
Regards,
Nick.
--
Nick Fitzsimons
http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/
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