Hello,
I am trying to design a website that has the word REP in it, but for some reason VoiceOver with Safari on Mac OSX keeps reading it as “Representative.”
It reads properly in NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver for iOS, however.
I looked at the Safari HTML reference page and it suggested:
<acronym title =“REP”> REP </acronym>
or <abbr title =“REP”> REP </abbr>
However no matter what I put in the title tag - it kept reading REP as Representative - even if I put in something like “Peach.”
REP - Representative was not even in the pronunciation dictionary in the VoiceOver preference dialog which is supposed to list all of the abbreviation translations.
Does anybody have any idea on how I could get this just to read as “Rep” and not “Representative” in the VoiceOver/Safari on Mac configuration?
Hm, so ideally you’d have VO correctly use the abbr tag to announce “Republican” and “Democrat” instead of “arr eee pee” and “dee eee em”. Especially since the word “rep” is used in English quite regularly in place of the full “representative”.
“My reps in Congress…”
So it likely should be that abbr tags or some other tag need to work consistently in VO, because you need at least once on the page the option to have “Rep” be read out as “Republican”. For safety then, I’d have at least one introductory sentence using the full word “Republican” stating that from now on in the page “Rep” will be used instead… however the user hears it from then on isn’t so bad because they’ve been told clearly what you mean by “Rep”.
Terms & conditions documents do this all the time. “Long official legal name of company” henceforth known as the company…
R-E-P is perfect though… REP is just a political party label - all of the other three letter party labels read fine such as DEM, LIB, etc. as just three letter words - just REP came through as Representative for some reason on VoiceOver no matter what I did…
Great, glad it helped. But it seems to read it out as R-E-P (that is, as an initialism), but I couldn’t find a way to get VO to read out ‘rep’, which seemed to be more what you wanted. Out of interest, what does REP stand for on your site?
Thanks Ralph! It would be preferable to have it pronounced “rep” but letter by letter will do and is much better too. I’ll try your suggestion. Thanks again.
