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builtin.dic breaks a synth's ability to handle plural acronyms #11472

@ultrasound1372

Description

@ultrasound1372

the problem:

Examine the output after NVDA's built-in processing of a string like "I have all their CDs" or similar. The point I'm making here is a string that has an all-caps acronym followed by 's' to indicate plurality. Some synthesizers are able to pronounce this properly, making it sound as if you had put an apostrophe there. This behavior causes many blind people when writing to use an apostrophe s at the end of an acronym to indicate plurality, however this is not proper writing. I would test all the synthesizers I have's ability to handle this but I don't know of an easy way to disable NVDA's built-in processing, I could never find a setting for it.

the proposal:

I am suggesting a minor alteration to builtin.dic, specifically the expression that breaks away words starting with a capital from a fully uppercase word. The second lowercase letter should be anything but s.
Specifically, this is the regex modification I'm proposing on line 4 of builtin.dic

([A-Z])([A-Z][a-rt-z])

Blocking questions:

NVDA does support many languages and I don't know the syntax of all of them. are there any languages where words with the second letter being 's' would be a problem here? How many other languages that use the latin script would indicate a plural acronym in this way? If this does pose a problem for languages that end up with s as the second letter, what NVDA usable synthesizers will handle this gracefully if it were to behave in the way I propose?

misc questions:

Does default/voice/temporary dictionary processing occur before NVDA's builtin.dic processing? If so and this is not implemented for whatever reason, a simple regex in the speech dictionary would be to add an apostrophe manually, which would actually make more synthesizers behave this way. I would not propose adding an apostrophe in builtin.dic.

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