Accessibility - screen reader reads currency wrong in bar chart

Hello, I have a stacked column chart with multiple currency measures. Variance, actuals, reimbursements and projected spend are all showcased on the chart. My issue is that narrator is reading the negative variance measure correctly, it will pronounce a negative variance of -$18,000 as "negative eighteen thousand dollars" but it will read all the other currency measures as "dollar one eight comma zero zero zero".

We take accessibility seriously at my agency and I can't for the life of me identify any difference between the measures on my end. They all have similar DAX, and are formatted as currency figures with no decimal places. Any ideas as to what is going on? 

DAX for negative variance measure (which is pronounced correctly by screen reader):

IF( ( [SUM OF ACTUALS] == 0 || ISBLANK([SUM OF ACTUALS]) && [PROJECTED VARIANCE] < 0, [PROJECTED VARIANCE], IF([SUM OF ACTUALS] < 0, [VARIANCE], BLANK())))

DAX for positive variance measure (which gets pronounced wrong):

IF([PROJECTED VARIANCE] <0, BLANK, [PROJECTED VARIANCE])

I am pretty confident it isn't the DAX, as I tried the narrator where Negative Variance was for a future month and projected variance less than zero, and it was read correctly, so the same underlying measure [PROJECTED VARIANCE] was ultimately returned by each expression.