[jawsscripts] Re: handling space as high order digit separator by Jaws
- From: "David Farough" <David.Farough@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:18:07 -0500
Thanks for that Doug:
This decision is not one that I am in favour of, however, it does seem
quite likely that over time, mor organizations may follow this
recommendation. This seems to be something that is much more easily
accommodated by the brain IE it's a contextual issue.
According to the Canadian Style as promoted by PWGSC, the preferred
standard is indeed to use a space instead of a comma. This is also how
it
has been taught in Canadian public schools for at least the past 25
years.
From Section 5.09 of the Canadian Style document at the PWGSC
Translation
Bureau site (http://btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/):
The Canadian Metric Practice Guide (CAN/CSA-Z234.1-89) of the Canadian
Standards Association specifies that groups of three numerals (triads)
shall be separated by a space, except in the case of monetary values.
It
advises against the use of commas as separators. Although both commas
and
spaces are still widely used in Canada, The Canadian Style recommends
that,
except in financial documents, a space be used instead of a comma. Such
a
space is also to be inserted after groups of three digits to the right
of a
decimal point. Note that numbers of four digits only (on either side of
the
decimal marker) need not be so spaced unless used in combination with
other
numbers of more than four digits.
David Farough
Application Accessibility Coordinator/coordonateur de l'accessibilité
Information Technology Services Directorate /
Direction des services d'information technologiques
Public Service Commission / Commission de la fonction publique
Email / Courriel: David.Farough@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tel. / Tél: (613) 992-2779
>>> Doug Lee <doug.lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 12:25 pm Monday, December 15,
2008 >>>
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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