Understanding Pronunciation

Intent of Pronunciation

The intent of this Success Criterion is to help people who are blind, people who have low vision, and people with reading disabilities to understand content in cases where meaning depends on pronunciation. Often words or characters have different meanings, each with its own pronunciation. The meaning of such words or characters can usually be determined from the context of the sentence. However, for more complex or ambiguous sentences, or for some languages, the meaning of the word cannot be easily determined or determined at all without knowing the pronunciation. When the sentence is read aloud and the screen reader reads the word using the wrong pronunciation, it can be even more difficult to understand than when read visually. When words are ambiguous or indeterminate unless the pronunciation is known, then providing some means of determining the pronunciation is needed.

For example, in the English language heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings, such as the words desert (abandon) and desert (arid region). If the proper pronunciation can be determined from the context of the sentence, then nothing is required. If it cannot then some mechanism for determining the proper pronunciation would be required. Additionally, in some languages certain characters can be pronounced in different ways. In Japanese, for example, there are characters like Han characters(Kanji) that have multiple pronunciations. Screen readers may speak the characters incorrectly without the information on pronunciation. When read incorrectly, the content will not make sense to users.

Benefits of Pronunciation

This Success Criterion may help people who:

Examples of Pronunciation

For Japanese, the ruby element is used for showing the "reading" rather than "pronunciation."

Resources for Pronunciation

Techniques for Pronunciation

Sufficient Techniques for Pronunciation

  1. G120: Providing the pronunciation immediately following the word
  2. G121: Linking to pronunciations
  3. Providing a Glossary that includes pronunciation information for words that have a unique pronunciation in the content and have meaning that depends on pronunciation
  4. Using standard diacritical marks that can be turned off
  5. Using the ruby element (XHTML 1.1)

Additional Techniques (Advisory) for Pronunciation

Failures for Pronunciation