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Re: WCAG 2 draft and abbreviations

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 5, 2007 12:10PM

On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Keith Parks wrote:

> But isn't it less a question of the *user* needing additional markup,
> but rather the *machines*, specifically speech synthesizers, needing
> additional information?

Both points are basically fictional.

> For instance, a reader ought to be able to tell, through experience
> and context, that the "US" in US Olympic Team is an abbreviation, to
> be pronounced "you ess". But how does the speech synthesizer know
> this? Do they have that level of logic and interpretation built into
> them?

Maybe they have. Maybe they just have a vocabulary that says that "US" in
capital letters shall be read letter by letter, rather than as the word
"us". Maybe it's a program option.

But how would abbr markup address the issue? Being an abbreviation does
not mean any particular pronunciation. Some abbreviations are read as if
they were words, some are read letter by letter (sometimes by the letter
names of a foreign language), and some are expanded. This may also depend
on style. Besides, if pronunciation were really the issue, why would you
want to indicate specifically the pronunciations of abbreviations? Special
symbols, foreign words, and even common words may have special
pronunciation issues as well.

> It would seem like a structural tag saying that "These letters are
> not an ordinary word, but are to be pronounced as initials" would be
> helpful,

Is it structural? The abbreviation "USA" _means_ pretty much the same, no
matter whether I read it as a word, or pronounce its letters by their
values in my native language, or in English, or some other language, or
spell it out as "United States of America".

If <abbr> were understood in the meaning you suggest, then quite a lot of
<abbr> tags around have the wrong meaning.

If you want markup that indicates pronunciation, it should be independent
of indicating something as an abbreviation. The main problem with such
markup is that few people would use it and few programs would support it,
in a vicious circle.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/