[jawsscripts] Re: handling space as high order digit separator by Jaws
- From: "Sina Bahram" <sbahram@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:21:35 -0500
I can't agree more. This is an absolutely vague standard for conveying
numbers and quite prone to errors and ambiguity .
Take care,
Sina
-----Original Message-----
From: jawsscripts-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:jawsscripts-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Doug Lee
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 12:26 PM
To: jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [jawsscripts] Re: handling space as high order digit separator by
Jaws
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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