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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

for

From: John E. Brandt
Date: Mar 12, 2009 1:00PM

IMHO I'm not sure the issue of readers who "jump around" an article not
getting the benefit of the definition of the acronym is that big a deal.
When reading, I find myself often doing this in both print formats as well
as digital/online formats. I know from experience that I sometimes have to
go back up into the beginning of the article/story to find more information.
This is not limited to acronyms. I find, particularly in newspaper articles,
that I need to go back up into the article to find out information provided
earlier in the story like the complete name of the person being quoted later
in the story. So, expecting screen reader users to do this also should not
be that big a deal - no?

I guess the best technological solution would be to have a smart
browser/screen reader combo that could look up all words, phrases and
abbreviations, figure out the definition (within the context) and provide
that info to the user on request. MS-Word can do this now, no reason why it
could not be incorporated into a browser. I believe there are some plugins
for Firefox that also do this by making calls out to Wikipedia or Google.

My personal belief is that we should use option 1. I tend to only use the
<acronym> tag when the acronym is typically used but may be misunderstood in
context. I am thinking that using the term AJAX in an article about web
design would be understood my most, but not all readers, and therefore the
<acronym> tag should be used on the 1st occurrence.

On the other hand, the acronym RADAR is almost universally know (and rarely
ever used with capital letters). This would not get the <acronym> tag.

Lastly, I try to break large articles up into smaller "pages" and will
repeat the "expansion" at the beginning of each page when the acronym is
used. In cases of automatic paging...I punt.

~j

John E. Brandt
Web Design, Development, Consultation
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937 

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 12:33 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

I'm struggling a bit with how best to expand acronyms and
abbreviations. Any insight you can provide would be valuable.

Which of the following do you believe is the best approach:

1. Expand only the first occurrence of the acronym in text -
"Assistive Technology (A.T.)" or "A.T. (Assistive Technology)"
This approach provides the expansion visually for all users. But if a
screen reader user jumps to a later instance of the acronym, they do
not get the expansion.

2. Expand only the first occurrence of the acronym using <acronym>
only - <acronym title="Assistive Technology">A.T.</acronym>
This approach provides the expansion, but as with #1 - only does so on
the first instance only.

3. Both 1 and 2 for only the first instance - Assistive Technology
(<acronym title="Assistive Technology">A.T.</acronym>)
This one seems redundant to me. A screen reader with
acronyms/abbreviations set to read would hear "Assistive Technology
Assistive Technology".

4. Expand all instances of the acronym using <acronym title="Assistive
Technology">.
This would always provide the expansion, but this could become VERY
tiresome - especially for long expansions (e.g., XHTML) and would
essentially negate the purpose of using the acronym.

5. Fully expand the first instance using <acronym title="Assistive
Technology">A.T.</acronym> then simply us <acronym>A.T.</acronym> for
all other instances.
Screen readers do nothing with acronyms if there is not a title
attribute, so only the first instance provides the needed expansion.
#5 still has the same problem as #3 if you also expand the first
instance in text.


So, which do you think is best? Or do you recommend some combination
of the above?

Of note is that WCAG 2.0 SC 1.3.4 allows #1 OR #4, but does not really
provide for any other possibilities -
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/#qr-meaning-located

I would think that #5 would be the best approach, but only if screen
readers fully expanded the acronym at the first instance it is
encountered (which may not necessarily be the first one in the code
that has the full expansion with the title attribute). But screen
readers don't currently behave this way, so what do we do?

Jared Smith
WebAIM

PS - Also of interest is the fact that <acronym> is not part of the
HTML 5 spec. <abbr> would be used for all things acronymish -
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-abbr-element Also note
the <dfn> element which is intended to be used with <abbr> -
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-dfn-element