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UK government changes website guidelines due to buggy screen readers

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

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Re: UK government changes website guidelines due to buggy screen readers

#13

Post by akavel »

efaref wrote: post #10
akavel wrote: post #8

Is it actually officially correct to use "eg" instead of "e.g.", and "ie" instead of "i.e." in English? (UK, US, AU, or whichever else?) Both http://dictionary.cambridge.org and http://dictionary.com seem to show only "e.g." and "i.e." for me?

No, the correct form is "e.g." and "i.e.", and screen readers cope with those fine. People also get "etc." wrong a lot, writing it as "ect", which presumably screen readers would fail at, too. Since people get it wrong, and there are more natural ways of writing these, these guidelines seem quite reasonable.

Ah, this seems to make sense, thx! Pity that this extended rationale is not present in the original article. Actually, this seems to render the article's claim rather unfair in laying the blame on screen readers ("[screen readers] read ‘eg’ incorrectly"), as it appears it should be rather "we have many errors of 'eg' instead of 'e.g.' in our texts, and they're too hard to catch for our editors"

edit: personally, I don't have to use a screen reader, but I do read words "aloud" in my mind when reading, and I believe seeing "eg" or "ie" without dots would make me stumble mentally too...

Re: UK government changes website guidelines due to buggy screen readers

#16

Post by octo_t »

aaron695 wrote: post #11

FFS can we stop spending billions on designing around screen readers and fucking spend billions on good screen readers.

this doesn't address the complaint that non-native english speakers may not know what `e.g.` and `etc.` mean.

Re: UK government changes website guidelines due to buggy screen readers

#18

Post by raverbashing »

aaron695 wrote: post #11

FFS can we stop spending billions on designing around screen readers and fucking spend billions on good screen readers.

I think they can't think of all situations (like people writing eg instead of e.g. or eff eff ess)
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