[Talk-ca] What do I poutine the name tag of a road with a suffix?

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 21:09 2022-12-10, Michael Stark đã viết:
> Calgary (and other parts of Alberta) are definitely strange in terms of 
> the quadrant suffixes. When written, the names are always abbreviated. 
> But when spoken, the names are always spoken unabbreviated.

Sorry to pile on again from south of the border, but I just wanted to 
make sure that the community in Alberta is aware that abbreviations -- 
especially without periods -- are much less likely to be processed 
correctly by text-to-speech engines.

Almost every navigation application uses a general-purpose TTS engine 
that wasn't designed specifically for navigation, such as the one that 
comes with your phone. Some premium TTS engines have extended the SSML 
standard to avoid ambiguity when interpreting things like street names. 
But these options are much more limited than what mappers may be hoping 
for when they choose to abbreviate.

For example, in Amazon Polly and Google Cloud TTS, you can mark up the 
entire street name with <say-as interpret-as="address"> to expand 
abbreviations. This option is designed for text that is consistently 
abbreviated, such as "Main St SW". Sometimes you get lucky with 
partially abbreviated text, for example with "2 Avenue S" ("two avenue 
south") [1]. On the other hand, "S Bank Trail" [2] is still pronounced 
"ess bank trail" even when interpreted as an address.

It would be easy to chalk this up to an industry-wide bug, but if 
interpreting the street name as an address were to more aggressively 
expand abbreviations, then "E Street" [3] would be "east street". Down 
south, this option already produces slapstick comedy like routes 9L and 
35W pronounced as "nine liters" and "thirty-five watts", respectively.

When I wrote guidance software in the past, I was aware that some local 
communities probably preferred to abbreviate some things like quadrant 
suffixes. However, the software needed to be functional in every country 
in every language and even support switching TTS engines when going 
offline, so there was little opportunity to fine-tune the behavior to 
local idiosyncrasies on a platform that I had little control over.

I can't help but wonder if some of the motivation to abbreviate the 
street names comes from how folks would like to see openstreetmap-carto 
display them. Maybe that isn't "lying to the renderer" per se [4], but 
it is ironic, considering that other tile layers like Mapbox Streets and 
OpenMapTiles would abbreviate these quadrant suffixes anyways. Surely 
the tradeoff of having to tag name:pronunciation would annoy most 
mappers; that key is only designed for overrides for unavoidable edge 
cases. [5]

Even if renderers matter more than routers, these TTS engine limitations 
matter for renderers too. For example, a blind person using a Mapbox- or 
MapLibre-powered map on their iPhone will hear street names pronounced 
by VoiceOver [6], which doesn't support the address extension I 
mentioned earlier. I already see some sidewalk ways around Calgary and 
Edmonton, so I'll spare you my spiel about the importance of 
accessibility mapping.

There seemed to be some recognition way back in 2008 at the beginning of 
this mailing list that abbreviations would be a cause for trouble. [7] 
But if, despite that awareness, the local community is content with how 
its customary tagging is realistically going to be processed, then step 
1 is to document the convention and step 2 is to get used to gently 
reminding outsiders of it forevermore.

(Full disclosure: I work for mobile navigation software at Mapbox and am 
proud of the many things we have special-cased to work better in Canada.)

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/296323533
[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/117289520
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/31584016
[4] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_for_the_renderer
[5] 
https://blog.mapbox.com/turn-by-turn-voice-guidance-upgraded-to-amazon-polly-27734cf4a6e8
[6] 
https://blog.mapbox.com/accessible-maps-for-blindness-or-visual-impairment-on-ios-5c7911c349c4
[7] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2008-March/000027.html

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us