Hi again!

I do have a lot of questions - at least a few at the moment.

How do you handle ordinal numbers in order to satisfy both the normal reader as well as screen readers.

a. Today, when a screen reader *might* read both an elements textcontent and it's title-attribute, it's title attribute instead of the content or only the content.

b. In a perfect world where screen readers are @media aware and all browsers support CSS 2.1 fully.

Example:

"The Swedish king, Carl <span title="the sixteenth">XVI</span> Gustaf..."

The goal is to have people seeing "XVI", but not the unnecessary tooltip the title attribute would produce, have printers and braille terminals spell XII, but have synthetic speech say "the sixteenth".

In my *perfect* world I would detect the media type and turn the tooltip off with JavaScript, and use the following CSS for speech:

@media speech {
    /* Find all elements that has a title attribute that
       ends with "eenth" */
    *[title$=eenth] {
        content: attr(title);
        /* replaces the content with the attribute value */
    }
}

(Unicode used below.)

However, I know of no way to detect the media either in JavaScript today, nor in any proposed standard for the future. Getting rid of the tooltip is of lesser importance, IMHO, than suppressing /ɛks viː aɪ/ from being spoken.

A totally different approach would be to use the designated Unicode sequence for Roman numerals[1] and have screen readers know that they should spell that out as numbers. How the would see the difference between "sixteen" or "the sixteenth" I do not know, though.

This approach also requires authoring tools to force all writers to actually use the proper Unicode characters, which might be hard. Auto correction in the background that pops up a question every time it detects something that might look like a Roman numeral may be very annoying.

In Sweden we say "vi" when we mean "we", so 99.9% of all times that character sequence is being typed it should not be changed. Occasionally, though, we might speak about our former king, Gustav VI Adolf...

Lars Gunther


1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Unicode






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