[jawsscripts] Re: handling space as high order digit separator by Jaws
- From: "E.J. Zufelt" <everett@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:49:32 -0500
Good morning David,
I do find this to be an interesting problem. For better or worse a solution
has been found and implemented for French content. I actually tested this
myself, I won't say how slow I had to set JAWS to run so that I could
understand Eloquence in French, but the number 123 456 789 was read as an
entire number and not three separate numbers.
Do you know if the french "number chuncking" solution works consistently, or
are there false positives and false negatives generated?
Thanks,
Everett
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Farough" <David.Farough@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Christian Sauvé" <Christian.Sauve@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 11:24 AM
Subject: [jawsscripts] handling space as high order digit separator by Jaws
>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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