Is there a standard way to make screen readers spell out numbers?
I am currently using NVDA and Firefox and have the following telephone number
<p>01234 567890</p>
This is read as
Zero one two three four five hundred and sixty seven thousand eight hundred and ninety
This is quite confusing to the listener. I would like some way of specifying that the screen reader should spell out the number like
Zero one two three four five six seven eight nine zero
I don’t know if (or which) screen readers support these, but (in an ideal world) they should.
CSS: Aural
HTML: tel
URI
RFC 3996: The tel URI for Telephone Numbers
So instead of
<p>01234 567890</p>
you would have something like
<a href="tel:01234-567890">01234 567890</a>
HTML: Vocabularies
- FOAF:
phone
property
- Schema.org:
telephone
property
- Microformats:
tel
class (hCard)
Maybe the speak-numeral
property in you stylesheet?
The speak-numeral property is used only in Aural Stylesheets.
The aural rendering of a document combines sounds and voices to go through the content of a document. Aural presentation occurs often by converting the document to plain text and then feeding this to a screen reader.
Situations and markets for listening to information could be:
- for blind people
- in the car
- help users learning to read
The speak-numeral property specifies how numerals will be spoken.
Source: http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/prop_speak-numeral.asp
Also, I found this post helpful:
http://www.nicksmith.co.uk/blog/2007/11/09/does-your-screen-reader-read-phone-numbers-properly/
I then came up with the following idea:
0<span>7000</span> 1<span>2</span>1 0<span>2</span>2
In VoiceOver this reads “zero, seven thousand, one, two, one zero, two, two”. Notice I kept the ’7000′ as one number; to me “seven thousand” is more memorable than “seven zero zero zero”.
and further
My research into aural CSS properties found that the property I’d need is already there – ‘speak-numeral: digits;’
you can use a character split
int[] numbers;
for(int i = 0; i<string.length; i++) {
numbers.add(string[i]);
}
note code is not tested since i dont know what language you are using java, c#, perl