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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

for

From: Randi
Date: Mar 12, 2009 5:50PM

I've been trying to wrap my mind around this. I'm guessing you're
discussing something the actual programing which would repeat
descriptions of acronyms at every occurance? If I'm correct, why does
it need to be different for screenreader users thatn for sighted
people? For example, at the beginning of an artical about SAAVI it
might say, SAAVI, the Southern Arizona Association of the Visually
Impaired, began, lah blah. Then for the rest of the article, it would
just say SAAVI. So you're asking whether it should repeat the whole
description? Why? If I read the acronym at the beginning of an
oarticle, I'll either remember it or I won't. I guess being a recent
screenreader user, I don't find it necessry. My main thing is
navigation. I can usually decipher acronyms and such from context,
just like when there's typos when I'm chatting. Like I don't know what
ajax is but I assume its something to do with programming. If I want
to know more, I google, or ask. So I guess I'm just trying to say that
I use the screenreader the same way I surfed when I could see. Like
was mentioned, I can just go back to the beginning of the article.

(I'm still leary of posting because I'm just an ordinary screenreader
user with no programming knowledge haha)

On 3/12/09, Chris Hoffman < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> How about:
>
> <abbr title="three-letter acronym" id="tla-abbr">TLA</abbr> is itself
> a <abbr aria-describedby="tla-abbr">TLA</abbr>.
>
> Yeah, yeah, it makes me a little uncomfortable, too. But I sure do
> love me some ARIA.
>
> Chris
>
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> 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
>>