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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

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From: John E. Brandt
Date: Mar 12, 2009 1:00PM

IMHO I'm not sure the issue of readers who "jump around" an article not
getting the benefit of the definition of the acronym is that big a deal.
When reading, I find myself often doing this in both print formats as well
as digital/online formats. I know from experience that I sometimes have to
go back up into the beginning of the article/story to find more information.
This is not limited to acronyms. I find, particularly in newspaper articles,
that I need to go back up into the article to find out information provided
earlier in the story like the complete name of the person being quoted later
in the story. So, expecting screen reader users to do this also should not
be that big a deal - no?

I guess the best technological solution would be to have a smart
browser/screen reader combo that could look up all words, phrases and
abbreviations, figure out the definition (within the context) and provide
that info to the user on request. MS-Word can do this now, no reason why it
could not be incorporated into a browser. I believe there are some plugins
for Firefox that also do this by making calls out to Wikipedia or Google.

My personal belief is that we should use option 1. I tend to only use the
<acronym> tag when the acronym is typically used but may be misunderstood in
context. I am thinking that using the term AJAX in an article about web
design would be understood my most, but not all readers, and therefore the
<acronym> tag should be used on the 1st occurrence.

On the other hand, the acronym RADAR is almost universally know (and rarely
ever used with capital letters). This would not get the <acronym> tag.

Lastly, I try to break large articles up into smaller "pages" and will
repeat the "expansion" at the beginning of each page when the acronym is
used. In cases of automatic paging...I punt.

~j

John E. Brandt
Web Design, Development, Consultation
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937