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Re: Acronym/Abbreviation best practice

for

From: Christophe Strobbe
Date: Mar 19, 2009 9:45AM

Hi Jared,

At 16:01 13/03/2009, Jared Smith wrote:
>On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Dan Conley wrote:
> > Is there a reason not to, besides 'it takes a lot of work?'
> > (find/replace, especially with regex, helps a lot in those
> > circumstances)
>
>Consider the WebAIM site where we use a lot of acronyms. It would, for
>example, be quite annoying to hear "Asynchronous Javascript and XML"
>for every instance of "AJAX". Now if screen readers were smart enough
>to only expand it in the first instance or on demand, then it would be
>less burdensome. You could also argue that the styling (typically a
>dotted underline) of all acronyms impacts readability of text. If the
>acronym is always expanded, the user may not even learn the acronym at
>all.
>
>For the record, we're in the process of removing acronym from all
>relatively well-known acronyms (HTML, CSS, etc.) on our site.

Could you explain why you are removing acronym markup for well-known acronyms?
The dotted underline can be addressed with CSS, so I assume the
reason is something else.

Best regards,

Christophe

>This
>might not be appropriate for other sites, but for our site and our
>audience, I think it makes sense. Less well-known acronyms (W3C, WCAG,
>etc.) will be expanded in text in their first instance and then not
>marked up with acronym. Very unknown and less commonly used acronyms
>(SMIL, SAMI, etc.) will be expanded in text in the first instance and
>marked up with <acronym> in all instances (or at least significant
>instances - such as immediately after new headings). In short, my
>thinking right now is to pretty much get rid of <acronym> on the site
>except for the occasional unknown acronyms/abbreviations.
>
>And yes, this will make it so we are never WCAG 2.0 AAA compliant. Meh.
>
>Jared Smith
>WebAIM

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Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
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