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Re: New [free] accessibility tools - Acronym and abbreviation generator

for

From: Ian Lloyd (Accessify.com)
Date: Apr 23, 2003 2:38AM

::> Interesting. I think the weakness is the acronym
library itself.
::> Obviously, this is only going to be a useful
application for
::> people who write content with the same
abbreviations as you! :)

Granted, and there will be a problem when I reach two
acronyms that mean different things to different
people, e.g. AA = Alcoholics Anonymous or Automobile
Association?

::> Here's what I propose to fix that.
::>
::> You should include the ability to choose from the
following
::> kinds of acronym libraries:
::>
::> (1) The default one, maintained by Accessify.

Yep

::> (2) A library uploaded via file upload from the
user's local
::> hard drive.
::>
::> (3) A library specified by URL.
::>
::> What should a "library" consist of? Simple --
it's just any HTML
::> page. Acrobot should scan that file for existing
<acronym>/<abbr>
::> tags, and construct a list of abbreviations. This
then forms the
::> library for that run of the program.

All good in theory, but here's where I run into
problems. With my current host, I cannot
screen-scrape, and therefore cannot easily pull text
off a page and interrogate it/manipulate it in ASP.

If anyone has any ideas that could help me to achieve
what Kynn's suggesting, that'd be grand.

If nothing else, perhaps I could just define a few
categories of acronyms/abbreviations and add them to
the database manually - then it could be an option on
the tool - "choose acronyms from the computing and
accessibility, scientific, astronomy category" etc etc

The final option would be to take a chance and simply
let *anyone* update the database. Of course, this is
open to abuse, so I'd have to check regularly !


====Ian Lloyd
Accessify - http://www.accessify.com/
Who am i? - http://www.webstandards.org/about/bios/illoyd.html

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