Test case: Speaking Special Characters
A visitor, Ben Boyle, recently wrote that he was surprised when OSX Voiceover announced a series of three periods as “elipsis.” It is a surprisingly accurate interpretation of a simple character string.
That got Ben to wondering about how other characters, and special encodings, are announced. Ben put together a selection of special characters and the variety of encodings that are commonly used for those characters. He provided the core of this case.
We agreed to try two different character set encodings, the older but ever present ISO-8859 and the broader UTF-8. I can already see significant visual rendering differences between the two character sets, with UTF-8 being the more accurate. It will be very interesting to know how the screen readers handle the test.
We are interested in knowing how theses things are announced by as many screen readers as you folks can use. Please listen to either or both of the following test cases. The tests are rather lengthy, but I think well worth while. Take notes on what you hear, and respond to this posting with your results.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
The second test case contains UTF-8-encoded characters, too.
Also, I need to complain about the comment form tab order. After the website field, you suddenly go to the first link in the page instead of the main edit field.
October 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Sorry Sebastian!
Ben has provided a better core for the ISO-8859 test case. It is now correct.
Sorry too about the tabindex problems. I never checked the default WordPress comment form and was surprised to find them there. It is another good reason to avoid tabindex … and to test better than I did. I removed all of them.
October 31st, 2008 at 9:38 am
Hi Bob:
The UTF-8 page rendered everything correctly for me.
The ISO-8859 page showed problems with “geospacial” numbers 3, 4 and 5 and “Arrows” number 2.
I am using Safari 3.1.2 with Mac OS X 10.4.11
HTH’s
tedd