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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Mar 12, 2009 11:30AM

I've encountered this too on many an occasion as working with Government
clients these are all too common.

I like the direction of Daniels suggestion but the problem there would be in
a) identifying how often to repeat the expansion (e.g. the first instance
after each <h2 / h3>...there is a debate in itself though not an interesting
one) and b) the maintenance procedures for the website...e.g. is this
programatically determined and output by a CMS or is the page manually
edited? If the latter is the case then I suspect this would be
unmanageable, especially if there is more than one person editing the
website.

Either way I concur with your argument against option #1 but it is not only
assistive technology users that can skip down the page - anyone can do that
which makes the argument for option #4 all the stronger and the one I would
recommend. Universal design, not just accessibility.

A solution may lie in the next version of XHTML
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-text.html#sec_9.1. However even when this
is released the browser support is likely to be lacking for a while,
especially from a certain browser.

Oh, one final thing on the selection of abbr or acronym...the <abbr> tag is
not supported in IE 6 or earlier versions. If your target audience is using
this then just be aware of this. I know many people are beginning to refuse
to support IE6 but sometimes you have little choice (and trust me this is a
debate I don't want to start).