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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

for

From: Chris Hoffman
Date: Mar 12, 2009 5:35PM


How about:

<abbr title="three-letter acronym" id="tla-abbr">TLA</abbr> is itself
a <abbr aria-describedby="tla-abbr">TLA</abbr>.

Yeah, yeah, it makes me a little uncomfortable, too. But I sure do
love me some ARIA.

Chris

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 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
>