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Re: ABBR vs. just spelling it out.

for

From: Penny Roberts
Date: Mar 22, 2006 9:10AM

Kynn Bartlett wrote:
> On 3/22/06, *Penny Roberts* < <EMAIL REMOVED>
> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >> wrote:
>
> Because the full form may be very long. I wouldn't want to read the
> full form every time and I certainly wouldn't want to hear it every
> time.
>
>
> Then why are people assuming that it should be included in <abbr> every
> time?
>
> Surely current user agents AREN'T smart enough to go "okay, I've already
> read this, so I won't read the <abbr>'s title out loud this time."
>
> The suggestion was given "spell out the whole thing, and then use <abbr>
> on all subsequent appearances." But that proposal leads to something
> which you (Penny) admit is undesirable. Is this really "increased
> accessibility" or is it subjecting blind folks to something which is
> unpleasant?

So this is another case of what the UAs do as against what they should do.
I don't want to read the full form every time; but I *do* want to be
able to hover over it and see what it stands for. (I was on just such a
site yesterday: full of acronyms and abbreviations. I'm sure that they
were given in full somewhere but I didn't have time to be whizzing up
and down a page finding the full form. Thankfully each and every
acronym was tagged and I could hover to my heart's content.)
The point that someone else made is that screen readers *don't* read
the full form from the <abbr> title so only writing it in full would
currently cause a blind user to hear it every time.
Shouldn't we be arguing that screen readers *should* be clever enough
to know that something is tagged as an abbreviation and offer an aural
cue that an explanation is available if required? Isn't it just as bad
to expect a blind user to go back to the start of a page to find out
what an abbreviation or acronym means as to read the whole thing in full
every time?

Penny