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Re: WCAG 2 draft and abbreviations

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From: Kroon.Kurtis
Date: Aug 24, 2007 1:00PM

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Jukka Korpela wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Philip Kiff wrote:

> ***

>> 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 user agents supported the _speak_ properties from CSS 2.0 -- which has been
around since *1998*, after all -- we could state exactly how we wanted each one
pronounced, viz.:

acronym {speak: normal;}
abbr {speak: spell-out;}

We could even change it depending on context:

#mainContentArea acronym.firstInstance {speak: spell-out;} /* Why? */
abbr.withDigits {speak: spell-out; speak-numeral: digits;}

Of course, this is all hypothetical -- but isn't WCAG 2.0 still hypothetical as
well?

Kurtis Kroon
Franchise Tax Board
State of California
916-845-5603
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