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Re: WCAG 2 draft and abbreviations

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 24, 2007 12:20AM

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Philip Kiff wrote:

> Also, my impression from that original thread was that each of the possible
> solutions mentioned by smithj7 would be acceptable under WCAG2, including
> the one that "proposes tagging the first instance after each header (h1
> through h6)".

Why would that matter? WCAG 2 is just a draft, which may never turn into a
specification, still less a widely approved one. Even if it does, it
should serve accessibility work, not vice versa.

> As noted in the original thread at the end of May, there is legitimate
> disagreement amongst "cultivated" English language users over the exact
> meaning of the word "acronym" and of the precise distinction between an
> abbreviation and an acronym.

The bottom line is that <acronym> has no useful defined semantics but may
understandably be taken in the dictionary sense. It is semantically
_worse_ than <span>, which by definition lacks all defined semantics.

> See Techniques for WCAG 2.0 - H28: Providing definitions for abbreviations
> by using the abbr and acronym elements - Applies to WCAG 3.14

Just because they keep the misguided and misguiding idea even in the new
draft doesn't mean we should use such markup. Their effect on
accessibility is generally negative, and the possible gains are better
achieved using other methods.

> I personally do not think that there is any danger of speech browsers/screen
> readers EVER selectively deciding to attempt to pronounce things tagged as
> <acronym> and not pronounce things tagged as <abbr>.

Yet such ideas were an essential part of the original motivation for
including those elements into HTML. It was a wrong idea and does not
become any better by time.

> If 65 percent of smithj7's users are still using IE6, then I would argue
> that yes, it does justify the use of <acronym> instead of <abbr>.

If you just want the tooltip effect, then <span> is superior to <acronym>.
But why would you leave anything essential dependent on a tooltip effect
that is not required by any specification, typically shows the text in a
tiny little window in a tiny little font for a tiny little time, and may
disturb people more than help them?

If you just want screen readers to read some text optionally, shouldn't
you consider the fact that the vast majority of users is not using screen
readers? Besides, the text will be missed by many screen readers too, e.g.
because their software has been configured not to read the text?

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