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RE: Acronyms and accessibility (was Java and accessibility)

for

From: John Foliot - bytown internet
Date: May 17, 2002 4:27AM

> Then there are some codes that can embed the full name
> represented by the acronym. I have to look them up but they are
> appearing to be a help for accessible design.

Acroynom: <.acroynom title="Social Insurance Number">SIN</acroynom>
Abbreviation: <.abbr title="Corporation">Corp.</abbr>

As an added bonus, IE v5&6 will provide a small "tool tip" when users place
their cursor over the acroynom coded with the title attribute (although it
seems that the same is not true for the abbreviation element...)

From the W3C web site:
The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate occurrences
of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make extensive use of
acronyms such as "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I.", as well as abbreviations like
"M.", "Inc.", "et al.", "etc.". Both Chinese and Japanese use analogous
abbreviation mechanisms, wherein a long name is referred to subsequently
with a subset of the Han characters from the original occurrence. Marking up
these constructs provides useful information to user agents and tools such
as spell checkers, speech synthesizers, translation systems and
search-engine indexers.

The content of the ABBR and ACRONYM elements specifies the abbreviated
expression itself, as it would normally appear in running text. The title
attribute of these elements may be used to provide the full or expanded form
of the expression.

Note that abbreviations and acronyms often have idiosyncratic
pronunciations. For example, while "IRS" and "BBC" are typically pronounced
letter by letter, "NATO" and "UNESCO" are pronounced phonetically. Still
other abbreviated forms (e.g., "URI" and "SQL") are spelled out by some
people and pronounced as words by other people. When necessary, authors
should use style sheets to specify the pronunciation of an abbreviated form.



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