Re: Email versus e-mail

[Lou Quillio <public -at- quillio -dot- com>]

Burnett S M (ISeLS) wrote:
> We have to meet accessibility standards (DDA/SENDA) and including
> the hyphen enables screen-readers to pronounce such words with
> greater clarity, thus avoiding confusion for our sight-impaired
> users.

This strikes me as the *only* reason to favor "e-mail" over "email".
 Good show pointing it out.

Email's a pretty big deal, though, eh?  It can have it's own name by
now, stop being an exception.  Screen readers don't know how to
pronounce it yet?  Wonder why not.  Have you tested this?  They say
"[schwa]mail" still?  Do Luddites make these things?

Heck, there's almost no paper mail in my (admittedly hacker-ish)
world, and almost none of it's good.  At any moment the whole thing
will invert, and "mail" will mean email, with postal mail needing a
qualifier.

'Course, there's something bigger happening.  What we've thought of
as email is arriving in new ways, SMS for instance, or IM, et al.
I'm leaning toward "(X) will send you a message" or "You'll receive
a message".  That lets you stay out of the consumption-mechanism
question, leave it to the user.  Seriously, there's no user under
thirty who needs a tacit primer on "What email is" every time it's
casually discussed.  Folks know if they've just provided an email
address to the service in question and know if email is the chief
communications vector.

"Email" already, people, unless the screen readers haven't
caught-up.  There's not a sighted user left who needs the hyphen,
including my mom.  They don't pause for an instant, and don't
benefit from textual usage purism -- which strikes me as political
and fussy.

Fussy's bad for business, and there's no practical reason to hold a
fussy line.

LQ
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