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From: Jon Abolins
Date: Thu, May 16 2002 8:24AM
Subject: RE: Acronyms and accessibility (was Java and accessibility)
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Several thoughts on this topic JF brought up:

One problem that can crop up with acronyms is the likelihood that the same one has different meanings around the world and in different contexts. For example, as a person in the United States who writes about privacy issues, I use the acronym SSN for Social Secuity Number. When I've done Web searchs for SSN, however, I find it is an acronym used in other contexts. Many entries concerning US Navy nuclear submarines show up.

We can no longer assume that the document will be read by people with the same understanding as the author's. Therefore providing some help with acronyms is a good idea.

A common practice is to give the full name represented by the acronym the first time it shows up in the body text. E.g.; "Canadian government issues the SIN (Social Insurance Number)...." For many documents, this can be very helpful.

If that is impractical, perhaps have a linked glossary on the Web site can be a help.

Then there are some codes that can embed the full name represented by the acronym. I have to look them up but they are appearing to be a help for accessible design.

On a different angle with acronyms and accessibility is the possibility that the adapative mode used to access the Web document might give misleading rendition. I mentioned the Canadian SIN acronym above. If a Web document doesn't expand the acronym and is awkwardly worded, I could imagine how the audio rendition of a SIN page could sound. <g>

J.D. Abolins

>>> = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = 05/15/02 07:48AM >>>
> On a completely un-related matter (except for the accessibility issue)...
[...]
> As a consultant to a number of Canadian Government agencies, one
> trend which crops up time and again is their persistent use of
> Acronyms: HRDC, DND/DDN, CLF, PWGSC, on and on and on...
> If you aren't familiar with these agencies, their acronyms can be
> quite meaningless.
[...]
> It occurs to me that Web accessibility is more than just html
> documents which can be accessed by screen readers; many
> consider email to be the "killer app" on the internet today.
> It would stand to reason then that accessible emails is every
> bit as important as accessible web pages, with many of the
> "rules" we apply in one area being relevant to the other.
<snip>


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From: John Foliot - bytown internet
Date: Fri, May 17 2002 4:27AM
Subject: RE: Acronyms and accessibility (was Java and accessibility)
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> Then there are some codes that can embed the full name
> represented by the acronym. I have to look them up but they are
> appearing to be a help for accessible design.

Acroynom: <.acroynom title="Social Insurance Number">SIN</acroynom>
Abbreviation: <.abbr title="Corporation">Corp.</abbr>

As an added bonus, IE v5&6 will provide a small "tool tip" when users place
their cursor over the acroynom coded with the title attribute (although it
seems that the same is not true for the abbreviation element...)

From the W3C web site:
The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate occurrences
of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make extensive use of
acronyms such as "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I.", as well as abbreviations like
"M.", "Inc.", "et al.", "etc.". Both Chinese and Japanese use analogous
abbreviation mechanisms, wherein a long name is referred to subsequently
with a subset of the Han characters from the original occurrence. Marking up
these constructs provides useful information to user agents and tools such
as spell checkers, speech synthesizers, translation systems and
search-engine indexers.

The content of the ABBR and ACRONYM elements specifies the abbreviated
expression itself, as it would normally appear in running text. The title
attribute of these elements may be used to provide the full or expanded form
of the expression.

Note that abbreviations and acronyms often have idiosyncratic
pronunciations. For example, while "IRS" and "BBC" are typically pronounced
letter by letter, "NATO" and "UNESCO" are pronounced phonetically. Still
other abbreviated forms (e.g., "URI" and "SQL") are spelled out by some
people and pronounced as words by other people. When necessary, authors
should use style sheets to specify the pronunciation of an abbreviated form.



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From: iris
Date: Fri, May 17 2002 4:44AM
Subject: RE: Acronyms and accessibility (was Java and accessibility)
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--- John Foliot - bytown internet
< = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> As an added bonus, IE v5&6 will provide a small
> "tool tip" when users place
> their cursor over the acroynom coded with the title
> attribute (although it
> seems that the same is not true for the abbreviation
> element...)

opera and mozilla do tooltips for both acronym and
abbr.

iris



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