[html4all] providing proper pronunciation for abbreviated forms

[Gregory J. Rosmaita]

aloha, rob!

pronunciation rules for the ennunciation of abbreviated forms 
should be controlled by aural stylesheets, including instructions
to AT how to pronounce an acronym or expansion -- the reason you 
hear the acronym spelt out is that that is the default setting for
most screen readers -- in the case of FireVox, if the page has CSS3
speech properties 

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/

applied to it, one can control:

1. speak: - default value 'normal' | 'spell-out' (this is backwards 
compatible with CSS2/CSS2.1)

2. phonemes, @phonetic-alphabet, and content
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/#phonetic-props

so, in the case of NATO, one would use the CSS3 Speech Module's 
phoneme property, the default alphabet for which is comprised of
the unicode values for the international phonetic alphabet (IPA)

IPA in Unicode / Unicode and IPA
* general: http://unicode.org/press/quotations.html
* comprehensive: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-unicode.htm

this is something, i suppose, i ought to add to the HTML wiki pages on
abbreviated forms, although i have argued in the past that it isn't 
just screen readers who may need a pronunciation guide, but those for 
whom the document's natural language is a secondary or tertiary language

gregory.
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I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a 
blessing it is that they never try to talk English.
                -- Saki (HH Munro), "The Chronicles of Clovis"
--------------------------------------------------------------
Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus at hicom.net
      Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/
         Oedipus' Online Complex: http://my.opera.com/oedipus/
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---------- Original Message -----------
From: Robert J Burns <rob at robburns.com>
To: HTML4All <list at html4all.org>
Sent: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:25:45 +0200
Subject: Re: [html4all] ACRONYM and ABBR

> On Apr 24, 2008, at 7:08 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> > One view is that no @title means that the abbreviaiton is an  
> > acronym. [1]
> >
> > However, when I tested VoiceOver and Fire Vox, it turned out that
> > ACRONYM and ABBR elements were read the same way. Thus, NATO was read
> > Enn,Ay,Tee,Oh.
> >
> > Which leads me to assume that acronyms are not read as acronyms  
> > anyhow,
> > and thus AT users are happy with acronyms being marked up as ABBR.  
> > Right?
> 
> Something like NATO should be pronounced by AT as "Nay - tow" 
> whether  or not it is marked up with ABBR of ACRONYM. 
> Pronunciations like that  should be drawn from a pronunciation 
> dictionary for the product (in  the same way word processors 
> have spelling dictionaries). ABBR should  be reserved for either 
> abbreviations not widely used or newly coined  abbreviations. In 
> such cases more information than simply pronouncing  it as a 
> word is needed (is "Nah - two" or "Nat - oh" or "Nay - toe", 
>  etc.). The wiki proposal I drafted with the cooperation of 
> others  provides the needed hooks for that[1]
>