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Re: Keyboard accessibility of abbreviations

for

From: Nasrin.Saef
Date: Apr 21, 2015 9:51AM

Thank you to everyone for your input! I was out of the office since Thursday afternoon, otherwise I'd have replied earlier.

Following Birkir's suggestion I updated the page with a toggle to shut the functionality on or off. Said toggle will appear along with the "skip to content" link and will be placed right after it in the tab order. He also recommended adding several aria attributes, which I'll have to look into; the toggle button should be fine since at its base it is a normal html checkbox, but the popup-boxes will probably warrant a logical link to the HTML elements they describe.

So, this is what I ended up with: http://jsfiddle.net/saenas/un40y5ey/8/

Deborah:
> And of course, while you're talking about jargony medical terms, it's also important not to get hung up on NASA, sonar, WWW,
> etc,or all of the other acronyms which most people know by acronym and rarely by expension.

I definitely agree with that. Before anything like the solution linked above is implemented I'll talk to my colleagues about weeding out some of the abbreviations (like PDF, kB etc.) that really don't need to be expanded for any user.

Jim and Sarah:
> I would also file a bug on all of the browsers. keyboard access to abbreviations and such should be a browser function.
> There should not be a need for thousands of authors to code some stuff that should be a function of the browser.
/

> If my skills matched my imagination, I'd make a browser extension that did that.

Full browser implementation or at least an extension for a toggle to expand the abbreviations would definitely be a better solution. Guess after spending the time already to piece together my attempt at a solution I might as well look up how browser bug reporting works when I have a bit of time.