html - Telephone numbers and screen readers

Question

Is there a standard way to make screen readers spell out numbers?

I am currently using NVDA and Firefox and have the following telephone number

<p>01234 567890</p>

This is read as

Zero one two three four five hundred and sixty seven thousand eight hundred and ninety

This is quite confusing to the listener. I would like some way of specifying that the screen reader should spell out the number like

Zero one two three four five six seven eight nine zero

Answer 1

Maybe the speak-numeral property in you stylesheet?

The speak-numeral property is used only in Aural Stylesheets.

The aural rendering of a document combines sounds and voices to go through the content of a document. Aural presentation occurs often by converting the document to plain text and then feeding this to a screen reader.

Situations and markets for listening to information could be:

• for blind people
• in the car
• help users learning to read

The speak-numeral property specifies how numerals will be spoken.

Source: http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/prop_speak-numeral.asp

Also, I found this post helpful: http://www.nicksmith.co.uk/blog/2007/11/09/does-your-screen-reader-read-phone-numbers-properly/

I then came up with the following idea:

0<span>7000</span> 1<span>2</span>1 0<span>2</span>2

In VoiceOver this reads “zero, seven thousand, one, two, one zero, two, two”. Notice I kept the ’7000′ as one number; to me “seven thousand” is more memorable than “seven zero zero zero”.

and further

My research into aural CSS properties found that the property I’d need is already there – ‘speak-numeral: digits;’