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Keyboard accessibility of abbreviations

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From: Nasrin.Saef@dimdi.de
Date: Apr 16, 2015 4:29AM

Hi List,

I'm currently trying to improve the keyboard accessibility of our website and recently decided to tackle abbreviations. According to the German accessibility regulations (and I'm sure there are equivalent success criteria in the WCAG) all functionality must be accessible by keyboard, and the expanded form of all abbreviations must be accessible to all users.

To achieve this, we set up this javascript solution: https://jsfiddle.net/saenas/un40y5ey/

But while it should fulfill the SC, we're not sure how good it is from a usability viewpoint. Since we provide medical information, there are a lot of abbreviations on our website, and implementing this solution (or any like it, really) forces keyboard users to tab a lot more. Additionally, while it is supposed to only expand the first instance of each abbreviation per page, this mechanism doesn't work for the navigation and the sidebar - so an abbreviation that is present in each element would be expanded three times.
For reference, here is a link to one of our pages that contains LOTS of abbreviations: http://www.dimdi.de/static/de/klassi/index.htm

That's why I'd like to ask keyboard users here: what do you think of such a solution? Do you think it would improve your experience or make it worse? Does anyone have suggestions for improvement?

Thank you for your feedback!