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Re: ABBR vs. just spelling it out.

for

From: Penny Roberts
Date: Mar 25, 2006 5:20AM

Kynn Bartlett wrote:
> On 3/23/06, *Penny Roberts* < <EMAIL REMOVED>
> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >> wrote:
>
> If you are going to quote me at least get it right: what I actually said
> was that expecting a blind person to go back to the beginning to find
> the expanded version was equally as bad as making them hear it in full
> (which referred to your suggestion of not abbreviating). Neither
> situation is good.
>
>
> Why is a blind person having to go back to the beginning of a document
> to find the expansion of a term any different from a sighted person
> having to go back to the beginning of a document? Or, alternately,
> remember the definition for the space of the page?


As I've already said: it isn't any different. There were two reasons
(as I recall) why the discussion had been narrowed down to blind users
by this point: one was that you yourself had done so; the other was that
it is appears to be only screen readers that present a barrier to the
use of the the expansion. (Braille readers would present the same
problem: either the expansion every time or not at all; but I get the
impression that they are not much in use. Is that right?) I did in
fact mention the possibility of screen readers giving an aural signal
that an expansion was available (the equivalent to the dotted underline)
back last week but no one took it up at the time.


>
> It seems that many people are convinced that acronyms and abbreviations
> are an accessibility barrier in and of themselves. Can you explain for
> which populations of people with disabilities this is true, and how
> exactly providing abbrevation expansion via <abbr> helps?

I've done that in another post but maybe you hadn't reached it when you
wrote this.

Penny