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Re: abbreviations

for

From: John Foliot
Date: May 27, 2010 6:24PM

Geof Collis wrote:
>
> No John, the one where you say I HAVE to use it.

FWIW I've never said anyone HAS to do anything - you are free to do as you
wish. I make my opinions and recommendations available to those who might
ask, and give supporting reasons and URLs to back those reasons. If you
chose to not take the suggestion, that's fine too.

****
As a follow up to yesterdays discussion, I pinged a daily user of NVDA,
and someone who is actively involved/interested in NVDA's development, but
who works for Mozilla as an accessibility specialist: Marco Zehe. This is
what he wrote back:

"NVDA doesn't do any special processing with the title attribute, but when
present, the "read current object" command, NVDA+NUM PAD 5, will read the
title as the name for the text frame object Firefox creates. For example
if you have this snippet:

<p>This <abbr title="Non-Visual Desktop Access">NVDA</abbr> screen reader
is not an <acronym title="People can't memorize computer industry
acronyms">PCMCIA</acronym> device.</p>

and navigate to "NVDA" using the virtual cursor, then press NVDA+NUM PAD
5, NVDA will read "non-visual desktop access text frame". But they do
currently not give an automatic indication that a particular word is an
acronym or abbreviation."

(I read this BTW as the title attribute on *any* element, not just ABBR)

So, if JAWS can't or won't expose the title attribute on demand it is a
flaw with the software, not of the code specification. It is too bad that
NVDA doesn't notify the user that there is a title value to the ABBR
element, but maybe that is a good thing: there is such a thing as too much
information as well. However it is confirmed that if you use the ABBR
element with a title value, users of NVDA at least can query what the
abbreviation or acronym means and be informed of such.

That's why I will do it. Y'all are free to do as you choose <grin>.

JF