Character encoding and screenreaders

[Luki_be]

Hi all, i was wondering how a screen reader reads the character encodings you might use, e.g. ↑

Does it get skipped or read the way it is written?

[AlexDawson]

Admittedly I am not entirely 100% sure on this, however from what I have read, screen readers should be able to read those representations of characters (as long as they need to be spoken) so it shouldn't cause an issue. Generally with language it's all about the spelling of words rather than the grammatical characters (which is what usually makes up those types of extended characters) so it will generally have little impact if any in the first place. What I would say is that if your page uses Unicode charset's (UTF-8) it should be read as it's intended to be spoken (as per the Aural specifications)

[Luki_be]

Admittedly I am not entirely 100% sure on this, however from what I have read, screen readers should be able to read those representations of characters (as long as they need to be spoken) so it shouldn't cause an issue. Generally with language it's all about the spelling of words rather than the grammatical characters (which is what usually makes up those types of extended characters) so it will generally have little impact if any in the first place. What I would say is that if your page uses Unicode charset's (UTF-8) it should be read as it's intended to be spoken (as per the Aural specifications)

Yeah, i use UTF-8 and just installed the fang extension for FF. That way i get an idea how it looks in a screen reader and the characters are rendered as intended.

[xhtmlcoder]

Obviously depends upon the software and what language it uses but typically they have no major issues with accented characters.

[Luki_be]

tnx for the input all

[gary.turner]

Yeah, i use UTF-8 and just installed the fang extension for FF. That way i get an idea how it looks in a screen reader and the characters are rendered as intended.

You might also want to install Fire Vox, a screenreader extension for Firefox.

If you have a modern operating system, i.e. Linux, you could install Emacspeak, a desktop screen reader that runs as a subsystem of the Emacs text editor.

cheers,

gary

[Luki_be]

You might also want to install Fire Vox, a screenreader extension for Firefox.

If you have a modern operating system, i.e. Linux, you could install Emacspeak, a desktop screen reader that runs as a subsystem of the Emacs text editor.

cheers,

gary

Tnx for the FF extension Gary. I recently installed NVDA, an open source screen reader but i'm gonna try out the extension.

A modern OS? Nah, i have only Windows

[presotrader]

had a similar problem with an expensive reader and French text - accented letters are pronounced properly as long as the language is detected (or pre-defined). it seems utf-8 is the common denominator, never had the opportunity to test it under the modern OS though

[Luki_be]

Well, the above mentioned screen readers do pick them up nicely

[presotrader]

tnx for the info - I have just tried Fire Vox on my browser and it does not work - probably it doesn't like 3.0.14 which I am forced to stick with for corporate reasons

[markbrown4]

You might also want to install Fire Vox, a screenreader extension for Firefox.

That is one of the cooler things that I have seen today. Thanks!