What do screen readers do with an ellipsis unicode character?

Question

For example, the unicode character "…" or the thing you get in HTML if you use the … entity. How will the various screen readers pronounce this?

Answer 1

The tools provided with the microsoft speach SDK 5.1 just skip over ellipsis, including the one you quoted. I was expecting it to at least pause but there was no noticeable pause.

Answer 2

This depends on the screen reader. In particular, most screen readers have a number of punctuation settings such as "some", "most", and "all". So it depends which category the screen reader puts the ellipses character into, which punctuation setting the user has selected, and what action the user is taking.

For example, in the JAWS for Windows screen reader (www.FreedomScientific.com) the ellipses isn't read when reading the document, but is read when navigating by letter or word.

I appreciate that's not a definitive answer, but my personal opinion is that you shouldn't avoid this character purely for accessibility reasons - each screen reader is different and this behaviour will probably change at some point in the future.