[lmm]

> And while ‘e.g.’ gets read correctly by screen readers, there are better, clearer ways of introducing examples for all users.

Strongly disagree. "e.g." has its place; it is often clearer than any alternative. Likewise "i.e.". "eg" is unpleasantly confusing even as an ordinary reader and should never have been allowed, but to remove "e.g." too is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[kitd]

Could you explain why it is better than, say, "say"?

(neat, huh?)

[pavel_lishin]

Because there are cases where that's a weird thing to say, say, this exact sentence.

[lmm]

They carry different connotations; "say" suggests a single example that is not necessarily representative but rather being used to make it easier to express the following part, whereas "e.g." can mean a list, and puts the emphasis on the examples themselves. One isn't better or worse than the other; rather both have their use cases.

[timthorn]

Because e.g. is formal and "say" is informal.

[supergreg]

They could put the e.g. inside a dfn tag or teach the screen readers how to read it.

[jscholes]

> They could put the e.g. inside a dfn tag or teach the screen readers how to read it.

I'm afraid not. AFAIK, screen readers don't apply any special processing for DFN tags. Speaking as someone who's using a screen reader to read this thread and proofread this comment, I'm not sure I'd want them to either, and I hadn't even heard of them until today.

Also, screen readers are able to speak through several, possibly hundreds, of different speech engines, so you would have to teach each of those engines to deal with these corner cases separately. Given that many of them were developed ten plus years ago and are now no longer under active development despite continued widespread usage, that's not really a realistic goal.

N.B. AFAIK is spoken by my screen reader/speech engine combo as "uh-fake". As a blind software developer, I have much bigger problems to worry about than memorising how my software speaks abbreviations. I of course don't speak for everyone though and clearer communication is always an excellent goal.

[rspeer]

In what cases would "e.g." be better than "for example", aside from when you're desperately short on space?

Most of the cases I see "e.g." and "i.e." -- with or without the dots -- it means "I'm putting zero effort into putting these phrases together into a clear sentence."