Unicode Roman Numerals and Display Readers – Terence Eden’s Weblog
How would you read this sentence out aloud?
“In Hamlet, Act Ⅳ, Scene Ⅸ…”
Most people with a grasp of the interplay between English and Latin would say “In Hamlet, Act four, scene nine”. And they’d be right! But screen-readers – computer programs which convert text into speech – often get this wrong.
Why? Well, because I didn’t just type “Uppercase Letter i, Uppercase Letter v”. Instead, I used the Unicode symbol for the Roman numeral 4 – Ⅳ. And, it turns out, lots of screen-readers have a problem with those characters.
Unicode contains the range of Roman numbers from 1 – 10, plus a couple of compound numbers, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 – in a variety of forms.
Why does Unicode contain these number which, to most people, are just squashed together Latin letter? As ever with Unicode, it is a mix of legacy and practicality.
Roman Numerals. For many functions, it’s preferable to compose the Roman numerals from sequences of the suitable Latin letters. Nevertheless, the uppercase and lowercase variants of the Roman numerals via 12, plus L, C, D, and M, have been encoded for compatibility with East Asian requirements. In contrast to sequences of Latin letters, these symbols stay upright in vertical format. Moreover, in sure locales, compact date codecs use Roman numerals for the month, however could count on the usage of a single character.
Far be it for me to disagree with the realized authors of the spec, however I believe they could have erred barely on this one. Whereas it could be preferable to re-use Latin letters, it results in ambiguity which might be complicated for a screen-reader.
Let’s write out the numbers utilizing common letters. Suppose you had been speaking about “Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene I”. Most display readers will see the “III” and accurately converse aloud “Roman three” or comparable. However once they get to the “I” it turns into ambiguous. Most will learn out “Eye”.
Display-readers hardly ever have a look at the entire sentence for context. Which suggests they get confused. It is pretty apparent that XIV ought to be “fourteen” as there is not any English phrase “xiv”. However what about “MIX” – is that 1009 or the phrase “combine”?
Anybody who has watched the BBC is aware of about their fondness for displaying in Latin the 12 months a programme was made. MCMXCVI is especially difficult for a screen-reader!
I took the next pattern sentence – utilizing each letters and Roman numerals.
Textual content. In Hamlet, Act I, Scene XI the 12 months is MCMXCVI and they’re watching Rocky V.
Roman. In Hamlet, Act Ⅰ, Scene Ⅺ the 12 months is ⅯⅭⅯⅩⅭⅥ and they’re watching Rocky Ⅴ.
Here is how numerous providers coped:
Amazon Polly
First, the excellent news. Amazon’s Polly learn the Roman numerals completely. It even pronounced ⅯⅭⅯⅩⅭⅥ as “nineteen ninety six”.
Nevertheless it will get quite confused with the ambiguous English textual content.
Microsoft Edge Read Aloud
I attempted with Microsoft Edge’s Read Aloud TTS.
It and makes a little bit of a hash of the English and simply skips the Roman numerals.
Google Text To Speech
The identical was additionally true with Google’s TTS products.
Espeak NG
The venerable Linux utility got here out with this.
It will get the “Capital i” incorrect, and reads the Roman numerals as their Unicode code factors.
Jaws
My good good friend Léonie Watson who writes extensively about accessibility was type sufficient to file another samples for me.
Listed here are Jaws’ “Expressive”:
And Jaws’ “Eloquence:
NVDA
Léonie additionally supplied a recording of NVDA Microsoft One Core
Narrator
And this is Narrator making a proper mess of it.
Others
If you realize of another screen-readers, or text-to-speech engines which may deal with this, please let me know!
On Linux, I raised a Pull Request to fix espeak-ng.
The remainder of the providers do not appear to have a method to simply report bugs to them. If you realize a method to increase points with these display readers – please accomplish that!