[Athen] athen-list Digest, Vol 167, Issue 17

[Stephen (Alex) Marositz]

Hi All 

I think a better approach is to teach screen reader users to use Word or whatever word processor they are using to generate the citations automatically and then clean them up if necessary using find-and-replace and other editing techniques. This way their citations will be consistent. This, in my experience, will cause them to site more because it forgoes the tedious memorization of punctuation and formatting that a screen reader user inevitably has to do when creating them by hand. Just looking at word on my desktop in my office, it contains formatting for APA, MLA, Chicago and others. You can even create custom styles if needed.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/apa-mla-chicago-%E2%80%93-automatically-format-bibliographies-405c207c-7070-42fa-91e7-eaf064b14dbb

Note, the referenced Microsoft support article is very mouse centric but it all works with the keyboard too. 

I hope this helps

Stephen Alex Marositz
ATI Coordinator
CSUDH
Ext 3077

-----Original Message-----
From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Adina Mulliken
Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2019 1:00 PM
To: athen-list at u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Athen] athen-list Digest, Vol 167, Issue 17


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In other discussions I've been told by a number of screen reader users, including librarians, that changing the punctuation verbosity settings is not something many screen reader users would know how to do, but I would be very interested in more perspectives about that.  Certainly a number of college students I've worked with are fairly new screen reader users and would struggle with doing that.  So, I wonder what people think about adding additional advice to Peter's suggested message?  Adding instructions or links to info on major screen reader vendor sites about how to change the punctuation verbosity might be one approach, but that could be complicated.

Although it seems horribly laborious, most students I talked to arrowed through one character at a time in places where they knew they needed to hear a lot of punctuation (to learn about citation style) because the screen reader would read all the punctuation that way.  Apparently they found that preferable to changing punctuation verbosity settings (or preferable to doing whatever it would take to learn to change them).  So maybe the message could suggest the arrowing through option too?  Some of my students haven't known about that.  I imagine there are some screen reader settings where the arrowing through wouldn't work, but it seemed like it commonly works.

Thanks for any more ideas or advice on that!

Adina

Adina Mulliken

Assistant Professor, Librarian

Social Work and Urban Public Health Library

Hunter College, CUNY

Phone: 212-396-7665

Pronouns: she, her

Thank you, Peter. I've been reviewing some of the other options, and I think I agree that we'll go with the notice for screen readers at the top.

Thanks,
D.
______________
Debbie Krahmer
Preferred Pronouns: My name/no pronouns

Associate Professor in the Libraries
Accessible Technology & Government Documents Librarian
304 Case-Geyer
Colgate University
315-228-6592
dkrahmer at colgate.edu


On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 8:32 PM Bossley, Peter A. <bossley.5 at osu.edu> wrote:


> There is no easy way to do this. However, it would be possible to 

> write out what you wanted the screen reader to read as an aria-label. 

> The issue with this would be that if the screen reader user were to 

> review it word by word they would read the label text and not the 

> format that is actually present on the page. It is for that reason 

> that I wouldn?t suggest doing this.



> The best advice might be to put a notice on the page itself above the 

> content e.g.



> The following section demonstrates syntax for search engines. If you 

> are a screen reader user we recommend that you increase your screen 

> reader punctuation verbosity for best results on this page.





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