The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[theducks]

<em>NO! Jon</em> is not the same as <i>Jon's Place</i>

One size can't fit all like you want because so many devices think they are Burger King Customers and do it their way

[JSWolf]

What TTS reads <em> doifferently then <i>? None that I know of.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What TTS reads <em> doifferently then <i>? None that I know of.

Two of the people I know who use TTS to read ebooks, etc. use applications that will read <i>text</i> without any emphasis while <em>text</em> is spoken slightly louder (there are options as to how much louder, etc.). These are not TTS on an ereader but applications that are designed for people with visual disabilities.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Two of the people I know who use TTS to read ebooks, etc. use applications that will read <i>text</i> without any emphasis while <em>text</em> is spoken slightly louder (there are options as to how much louder, etc.). These are not TTS on an ereader but applications that are designed for people with visual disabilities.

That's fine, excellent. Someone should explain this to a major publisher that simply uses em and strong everywhere, universally.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Two of the people I know who use TTS to read ebooks, etc. use applications that will read <i>text</i> without any emphasis while <em>text</em> is spoken slightly louder (there are options as to how much louder, etc.). These are not TTS on an ereader but applications that are designed for people with visual disabilities.

Can you set it to scream the emphasized words

This conversation is interesting. What I've learned of ebook formatting is all self-taught and only applies to my own books I'm reading on my devices. So I never knew about the difference between <i> and <em>.

[DNSB]

Ugggh. Don't remind me. For one of the people I mentioned, I modified an ePub ebook changing most of the <em> tags to <i>. Pretty mindless search for <em, check if it is a name or other item that is supposed to be italic, modify or leave and move on to the next. Oddly, the only strong tags I had to change to bold were the one involved in the chapter titles. 30 of the most boring minutes I've spent in the last couple of years. I also used the Access Aide plugin and some skull sweat and spent another hour making the ePub as good a match to the accessibility guidelines as I could manage. Doing this during the production of the epub would have added, IMNSHO, at most 10 minutes.

BTW, the original complaint was due to using <em> tags to italicize the first phrase in each paragraph.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Two of the people I know who use TTS to read ebooks, etc. use applications that will read <i>text</i> without any emphasis while <em>text</em> is spoken slightly louder (there are options as to how much louder, etc.). These are not TTS on an ereader but applications that are designed for people with visual disabilities.

Which programs are these that will read <em> differently then <i>?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Can you set it to scream the emphasized words

This conversation is interesting. What I've learned of ebook formatting is all self-taught and only applies to my own books I'm reading on my devices. So I never knew about the difference between <i> and <em>.

Not sure how high you could turn up the volume. Probably not that high.

There were conversations a while back about <i> vs <em> and <b> vs <strong> which I found interesting. I didn't see much if any difference between <i> and <em>—after all, they looked the same on page—but once I realized the different purposes, I started attempting to use them correctly. This has led me into trying to make epubs that I edit accessible for those using text to speech as well as those with vision good enough to read the text.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Which programs are these that will read <em> differently then <i>?

Perhaps you should do a bit of research?

One of the applications which I think was supplied by the CNIB, had both audio and Braille output capability. The other one I'm not sure who supplied it.

You might want to check out either JAWS or NVDA screen readers, both of which can be configured to enable semantic (em, strong) tags.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DNSB

There were conversations a while back about <i> vs <em> and <b> vs <strong> which I found interesting. I didn't see much if any difference between <i> and <em>—after all, they looked the same on page—but once I realized the different purposes, I started attempting to use them correctly.

Now I'm imagining when you would use <em> vs <strong> (as I imagine the robot would read them aloud differently) and when you might apply <em> and <strong> at the same time.

Like Neal's breakdown in The Iron Giant. I'd imagine diagramming that sentence something like "What you currently have <em>in your mouth... <strong>IS ART!</strong></em>"

Would that make the TTS robot read the sentence something like the actor does here?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Now I'm imagining when you would use <em> vs <strong> (as I imagine the robot would read them aloud differently) and when you might apply <em> and <strong> at the same time.

Like Neal's breakdown in The Iron Giant. I'd imagine diagramming that sentence something like "What you currently have <em>in your mouth... <strong>IS ART!</strong></em>"

Would that make the TTS robot read the sentence something like the actor does here?

That I am not certain about. It's entirely possible that TTS could be configured to do so.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

<em> was invented to replace <i> when <i> was very mistakenly removed from HTML 5. So <em> doesn't actually need to exist since they allowed <i> back.

Complete rubbish. I wish you wouldn't spout your uninformed opinions as if they were absolute fact.

Both <em> and <i> appear in HTML 2.0 aka RFC-1866 from November 1995:

5.7.1.3. Emphasis: EM

The <EM> element indicates an emphasized phrase, typically
rendered as italics. For example:

A singular subject <em>always</em> takes a singular verb.

5.7.2.2. Italic: I

The <I> element indicates italic text. Where italic typography is
unavailable, an alternative representation may be used.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If the TTS is any ood, it will read italics properly. <em> is not needed. It should be <i>. <em> was invented to replace <i> when <i> was very mistakenly removed from HTML 5. So <em> doesn't actually need to exist since they allowed <i> back.

I've read books that use italics for flashback scenes. You wouldn't want a TTS to read that with an emphasis, hence the difference between <em> and <i>.

Annoyingly, when posting a fanfic on Archive of Our Own, they change the <i> to <em>s.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For one of the people I mentioned, I modified an ePub ebook changing most of the <em> tags to <i>. Pretty mindless search for <em, check if it is a name or other item that is supposed to be italic, modify or leave and move on to the next.

My first pass is to look for <em>[A-Z] to find capital letters. This finds titles, ship names., etc.

Since those sorts of things are often repeated, I scan through the find results (Expression Web lists them all in a box) and add each unique one to a regex in a text editor:

<em>{(New York Times|Titanic|Star Wars)}</em>

The replace is:

<i>\1</i>

This leaves a lot fewer to check manually.

I'd really like the ability to search for a misspelled word in a em tag, to help find foreign words and phrases that should be italicized.

[nabsltd]

My most recent pain point with styling to get italics was the following from a commercial e-book with Dutton as the original hardcover publisher:

<style>
.cs {
  font-style: italics;
}
.plain {
  font-style: normal;
}
</style>

<p class="somepara cs"><span class="plain">“We </span>need <span class="plain"> you"</span></p>

Yes, any paragraph where any word should be italicized (either through <em> or <i>) got styled as "italicize the whole thing and add exceptions for non-italic text".

Talk about an nightmare for accessibility.