Spoken Names

Hello and greetings from a new mapper.
I have researched taginfo and I cannot think of a solution. I have for threads here and I cannot find much discussion. If there exists a thread or solution, please point me in the right direction.
The policy of open street maps seems to allow but discourage abbreviation of names if at all possible, and to tag street names with what the street sign says. But if the street sign already uses an abbreviation, a conflict arises with voice engines on navigation programs. For instance, in my area there is a street named “Mid Rivers…”. But the voice engine speaks “Middle Rivers…”, because it assumes an abbreviation. But developers can’t tell the voice engines not to use abbreviations at all or they would just speak single letters in some cases, possibly making matters worse. Google maps speaks it correctly, but it gets other things wrong. The whole thing seems to be a free-for-all right now.
There are other keys, such as loc_name, full_name, but I am not sure what these would do, as there is no documentation, and I don’t know if apps can be told which one to speak. There are other assorted keys that include abbr in some form or another but none of those appear to have a yes/no value associated with them. There seems to be no way to tell the voice engines whether or not they should abbreviate when speaking.
I am wondering what the community would think about adding a new key called “spoken_name” for naming streets, or something similar. That way, developers could tell their apps that if there is a spoken_name key present in the description, then use the value of that to speak, otherwise use the value of “name”. W 5th St would be given the value " west fifth street" and spoken just that way. I think voice guidance is important to the driving public. Conflicts cause confusion and confusion can lead to accidents
I believe that if a solution is decided upon and implemented, it would make it easier for developers, as well as avoid much confusion among the users of apps which use open street maps for navigation. And it would tend to make open street maps more popular with app developers and users in the long run.
Thanks for any help

Abbreviations are not allowed in “name=”. Even if the street sign is an abbreviation, the “name=” shouldn’t be. (the only excuse being if you don’t know it was an abbreviation)
This rule is unfortunately widely broken, but that doesn’t mean that abreviations are tolerated.

There is already enough mess with name=, alt_name= old_name= local_name=, official_name=, sorting_name=, etc, etc… so I doubt adding new tags to this mess would be any helpful.

Thank you for that clarification. Yes, unfortunately it is so widely broken that software vendors are assuming abbreviations where none exist. So I suppose the best way to handle the problem for the long term is to contact the developers of the navigation apps that use OSM and make sure they are aware of and follow that policy with their spoken directions. But if the voice guidance engines stop expanding those abbreviations, we’re going to hear a lot of nonsensical syllabes like “St” instead of “Street”,etc., which is just as bad. It would take an awful lot of editing to get all names on OSM compliant, and I doubt that it would ever happen. I just thought that the additional tag would give mappers and devs another option to make the transition more smooth. Just a thought.

The best thing you can do, is each time you encounter an abbreviation, you fix it in the OpenStreetMap database. If enough people do this, the problem will go away.

in 2006, there was no OSM data, around 2010 there where more more roads mapped in Germany than in TomTom.
So it is possible, just start doing it, write blog posts (diary), ask you community (the US one I guess) to help out. It might get done faster than you think.

I agree ! I started to massively rename “St. Gallen” into “Sankt Gallen”, but when I started to change a quartier of Basel from “St.Johan” to “Sankt Johan” some random guy started to scold me and revert changes, as according to him “St.Johan” was the real name and not an abbreviation - I didn’t feel like arguing so I stopped but I still think he’s wrong.

In the UK “St John Church” is also valid, it is not considered an abbreviation. (at least that’s something I picked up on some OSM forum/mailing list)

Because of voice engine “Y” and “Z” we can’t map for voice engine “X.”