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Re: WCAG 2 draft and abbreviations

for

From: smithj7
Date: Aug 22, 2007 5:40PM

Great question.

We have been discussing the same issue at our Florida standards
meetings. In general, using our current but older standards (2003), we
always follow the print version e.g. Individual Employment Plan (IEP)
and then use IEP there after. For typical pages I get, if this format
wasn't followed, I can quickly fix to follow this standard.

However, I also put minutes up on the website. Minutes can't be changed.
There were many abbreviations and/or acroynms in the minutes so I used
the the acroymn tag for all these mysterious letters, after playing
detective for half. I put them in all places. I have done this for
about 2 years (or eight to ten minutes). Two people emailed the first
time they saw them. One liked it, the other was just curious why they
were there. He noted that "everyone" knew what those mysterious letters
meant. I told him the DOE rule for abbreviations and my inablity to
change the minutes and he agreed that this was a good way to meet my
requirements.

Note: I used the acroynm because about 65 percent of our customers are
using IE6. The purpose being two-fold being my website standards and
more important that users know what letter like LOFA mean in the
minutes.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Peter Weil
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2007 10:46 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] WCAG 2 draft and abbreviations


I know this topic has been discussed previously on this list, but I
still have some quesitons about it.

My colleagues and I are trying to come up with some best practices
for tagging and expanding abbreviations and acronyms. Most copy we
receive contains a large number of these things -- alas, we have no
control over this.

We all agree that including tags with expansions or explanations is
the best technique currently available (see exception below). But we
are still uncertain whether to tag and expand only the first
occurrence or all occurrences (leaving aside the question of how to
accomplish this efficiently). One colleague proposes tagging the
first instance after each header (h1 through h6).

To complicate matters, often the first occurrence in the copy we
receive already contains the expansion -- this satisfies one of the
'acceptable' techniques:

"provide the full form before providing the abbreviated form"

Example: "The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
(UNHCR) was established in 1950 to provide protection and assistance
to refugees."

In these cases, what should we do with additional occurrences? Tag
and expand, tag with no title attribute, or nothing?

This brings up another question: do the abbreviation and acronym tags
(aside from their semantic correctness) in and of themselves help in
any way with accessibility, or is the expansion (title attribute)
always needed to make them useful?

How are others approaching this problem?

--
Peter Weil, Web Developer
University Communications
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Phone: 608-262-6538
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>