But, then again, this is exactly the reason I opt for plain text whenever possible, for exactly that reason.
What does PG's non-standard remapping of underscore and asterisk to be reinterpreted as typographical markers in their "plain text" files do to your screen reader? That depends (ostly) on what the punctuation level is set at. Generally, I have it set to some, in which case, it ignores such
On Mar 13, 2011, at 8:24 AM, Jim Adcock wrote: things, and just reads the text. If I have it set to all (as I do when programming) it simply reads them as the characters they are. Most visually impaired folks who use screen readers dial down the punctuation, because it gets quite irritating to hear periods, question marks, semi colons, and the like, so we usually set the screen reader at a level which ignores all extraneous punctuation, though with some screen readers, punctuation is used to control the synthesizer, and so things get screwed up when large amounts of it is used. For example, voiceover (the screen reader built into osx) used to use two left brackets to control voiceover (actually, I think it still does, but it's a little more picky now about what triggers changes) and since objective C has lots and lots of brackets in it, when reading source code on tiger early versions, it was extremely difficult to read certain passages of source, because of the [[ and ]] combinations that showed up in the code naturally. Apple apparently has worked on this, because it's no longer nearly impossible to just hit read all, and let voiceover read the entire source code of a complete program source file, something that was nearly impossible under early versions of tiger. Other external synthesizers have their own control commans for speech rate, volume, pitch and the like, and sometimes those were triggered by a question mark (?) followed by numbers and letters to activate/ change speech settings. Occasionally, a stray text file or two would unknowingly trigger such changes, and it caused no end of frustration for the user who had to figure out what just happened. Most screen readers these days use software generated speech, and send commands directly to the screen reader, no longer relying on such cludges, but some folks still use those external synthesizers because it makes the cpu load lighter on resource poor computers who don't have the spare computing cycles to drive the software synthesizers. I have several such synths here, and although I don't use them regularly, I do still haul them out from time to time when doing work on linux or dos (yes, there's still work to be done on dos) so I still encounter silly things like this once in a great while, but on modern osx and windows systems, these sorts of things don't happen very often if at all.