[jawsscripts] Re: handling space as high order digit separator by Jaws
- From: Doug Lee <doug.lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:25:34 -0500
I did not examine the article referenced, and I had not heard of the
ISO standard to which you refer. Neither have I thought about this
for more than five minutes, so this may be categorized as a knee-jerk
reaction I suppose...
That said, I am slightly stunned that the Space would be officially
blessed as a separator for parts of a single number, simply because of
the ambiguity this can easily cause. Consider the sentence, "That guy
owns 25 1909 pennies!" JAWS reads this correctly: "1909" is a year
in which pennies were made differently enough to be considered rare,
as I recall. The new system would have us interpret that as a grand
total of 251,909 pennies, unless we can be clever enough to figure
that four digits to the right of the space necessarily means it's a
new number. If someone comes up with a noun phrase legitimately
beginning with a three-digit number though, the new system would
result in an irresolvable conflict.
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:24:50AM -0500, David Farough wrote:
I have sent the following message to Freedom Scientific to find out if there is
any intent to handle this issue, given that ISO standards recommend the use of
a space to denote high order digit groupings in numbers. Since these
accommodations are easily handled in French, I wonder how difficult it would be
to accommodate this for English text.
Text of my message to FS follows.
Recently our communications branch has decided to follow the ISO standards with
regard to the use of commas for high order digits and thousands separators in
all of our published material on the web. An article that summarizes this
recommendation can be found on wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Digit_grouping
I will provide below a couple of paragraphs from one of our publications which
illustrate this practice.
In the past year, the public service of Canada, which is subject to the
Public Service Employment Act (PSEA), continued to renew itself, growing to
over 195 000 employees. With the ongoing departures of baby boomers and the
4.1% growth in the public service over the last year, hiring activity increased.
This growth translated into 54 734 new hires to the public service in
2007-2008, an increase of nearly 12% over the previous year. "Increased hiring
activity
offers opportunities for the public service to recruit people with the kind of
skills it needs for the future and to compete more effectively with other
sectors," added Maria Barrados.
When Jaws reads numbers which have been formatted this way it considers them as
two separate numbers. so it would pronounce 195 000 as one hundred ninety five
zero zero zero. When Jaws presents this in Braille, it appears as #195 #000 so
the user is lead to think that these are two numbers rather than one.
I would like to know if this issue will be addressed in future versions of Jaws.
Obviously this issue cannot be handled using the number processing options
because these options govern how Jaws handles numbers and not how Jaws
recognizes the start and end of a number.
So far, the only thing that we have found that will get around this issue is to
use an invisible comma to separate these digit groupings. I think you could
appreciate the problems we might have trying to maintain our content using this
solution.
I will point out, that this is only a problem in English text because the use
of the space is standard in French text and Jaws accommodates this with no
problem.
I would appreciate any advice you might be able to give us on how to handle
these numbers. A quick solution to this problem would be appreciated as well,
but our content is publically available on the internet and we have no control
over what version of Jaws or any other screen reader might be used to read our
text.
Thank you
David Farough
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--
Doug Lee, Senior Accessibility Programmer
SSB BART Group - Accessibility-on-Demand
mailto:doug.lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
"While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done,
it was done." --Helen Keller
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