WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: usage of abbreviation tag

for

From: Ken Petri
Date: Sep 17, 2013 11:32AM

The fact that title on abbreviation doesn't work with keyboard focus is
perhaps understandable, since abbreviations are not in the tab order. (I
guess that's the justification??) But even if you put them in the tab order
(not something I'm recommending but technically easy to pull off with
tabindex="0" the title still does not display (except in IE 10! -- maybe
earlier versions?).

Overall the display of title on abbr requires a mouse hover -- not touch,
not cursor focus. So I guess I have to agree with Olaf and Joe that
following the editorial practice of expanding the first instance in the
text is the most universally usable option.

However, what about those situations where an accepted standard argues
against that, like Jon points out, or the author just forgets?

BTW, I added a CCS generated-content example. I made it focusable using the
tabindex=0 trick. Now with keyboard tab navigation you can see the tooltip.
My implementation is not robust. Plus you get the unfortunate side effect
that NVDA says the abbr is "clickable," and JAWS says it is both
"clickable" and that one can "edit" it. Looks like you just can't win with
a simple implementation. Hans Hillen's jQuery UI tooltip seems to work
well, though: http://hanshillen.github.io/jqtest/#goto_tooltip. And Dojo
has something similar.

Thanks for the feedback.

- ken