Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 07/07/06 18:18

On Fri, 7 Jul 2006, Dylan Parry wrote:

> Swampy Bogtrotter wrote:
>
> >> What should I use to make a combined "TM" (for Trademark), and a
> >> combined "SM" (for Service Mark)?
> >
> > You could always just type the letters TM or SM and then superscript
> > them.....
>
> Would a screen reader treat the two differently?

If you're not wanting to shell out for a real screen reader, then I'd
recommend at least installing Opera and then enabling the voice option
(which provokes another download).

(AIUI it's only available in English and for Win/2k or /XP; but as a
freebie, it's worth having.)
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/voice/

You don't *have* to use voice-control for browsing (which seems to be
the feature that's emphasised in their blurb), although obviously you
can if you want to. If you just select the text area that's of
interest, and use the keycommand "v", it will speak-out the selected
text for you.

> Ie. do they pronounce the TM character as "Trademark" whereas a
> superscript T and M is pronounced "Tee Em"?

I just tried exactly that in Opera, and the answer is "yes".

However, the voice feature doesn't seem to recognise ℠ - the
*browser* displays it fine as a raised SM glyph, but the voice
component remains silent at that point on the test page.

Unlike IBM HPR (or rather, the underlying speech library which IBM HPR
uses), I'm not aware of any facility in Opera to do custom additions
to *its* voice rules.

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