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

Jarek Piórkowski jarek at piorkowski.ca
Mon Dec 12 03:29:29 UTC 2022


On Sun, Dec 11, 2022, at 02:27, Minh Nguyen wrote:
> 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.

If local community agrees that spelling "NW" is not an abbreviation, it should stay IMHO.

Here are some example street names that are not pronounced the way they're written in OSM:
- St John's Wood Road, St Pancras Way (London); St. Clair Avenue West (Ontario - disclaimer: guidance to prefer this proper spelling was spearheaded by me)
- Queen Elizabeth II Highway, King George III Lane

Now you can make the case that a text-to-speech engine likely knows how "St. John's" and "Elizabeth II" are pronounced, but these are special cases coded into the engine. So that limits the argument to "it's a special case that happens to likely not be coded into a TTS engine" and that's getting pretty close to tagging for the renderer IMHO.

---

Just to connect threads, there's also this discussion about "N" or "North" in Regina: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2484432 <https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/2484432#map=15/50.4744/-104.6083&layers=N>

--Jarek
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