Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Personally I always try to re-write sentences that use "e.g.", "i.e." or "etc.", as I think they're symptomatic of lazy writing. There's usually a much better way to write what you're trying to say. Similarly with excessive use of parenthetical clauses.