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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

for

From: Daniel Tang (dtang)
Date: Mar 12, 2009 11:15AM


Jared:

Your are great in that seek ideas from the audiences.

I believe that combination of the two makes sense. If the article is
short, expand in first occurrence will suffice. But if it is a long
passage, it will be helpful to expand it again. But do not expand it in
every occurrence.



Daniel Tang
Accessibility Specialist CCIE # 3681
Cisco Systems
170 W. Tasman
San Jose, CA 95134
Phone: 408 526 7814
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 9:33 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

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