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Re: Readability of abreviated terms

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 11, 2019 8:58AM

Screen readers typically ignore the <abbr> attribute altogether, they
just read its content (or try to pronounce it the best they can).
There is a setting in Jaws that expands abbreviations, NVDA reads the
extended form if you arrow over it and TalkBack reads the extended
form by default.
See this excellent article for more info:
https://www.24a11y.com/2019/taking-accessibility-beyond-compliance/
(scroll down to the abbreviation section)

I also like this article about how you could use CSS content to
provide a screen reader accessible extended form (this is admittedly
hacky and to be used sparingly but it is pretty much the only way to
consistently make the extended form available to screen reader users,
though it doesn't help keyboard only users):v
https://adrianroselli.com/2019/02/f87-css-generated-content-and-wcag-conformance.html

At the end of the day this is a user agent/assistive technology vendor problem.
Butthe the the fact remains that end users always suffer until the
problem is fixed.



On 12/11/19, Swift, Daniel P. < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> General thought, it's a shame that the "abbr" (abbreviation) tag doesn't
> have a phonetic attribute. How does the abbreviation tag work with screen
> readers with the title attribute (example: <abbr title="Quality
> Assurance">QA</abbr>)? Do both the 'title' and text get read or is it just
> one or the other? I'm assuming a mixed bag across software since the
> mileage for the title attribute varies...
>
> Dan Swift
> Senior Web Specialist
> University Communications and Marketing
> West Chester University
> 610.738.0589
>
>