Re: PRI - 10 abbreviations and acronyms

I am not going to repeat my arguments about "priority 2 ness" that I just
applied to the lang attribute question. On the abbreviations and acronyms
issue, I believe that it is sound style to exand these at natural points in
the text. But this is neither a requirement, nor something that is
disabilities related, in my opinion.

About the ABBR and ACRONYM from the HTML 4.0 spec:  " Marking up these
constructs provides useful information to user agents and tools such as
spell checkers, speech synthesizers, translation systems and search-engine
indexers. " It may be useful, even for speech synthesizers, though I doubt
it very much; it certainly is not priority two.

The use of ABBR and ACRONYM elements should be priority 3.

Jim Thatcher
IBM Special Needs Systems
www.ibm.com/sns
thatch@us.ibm.com
(512)838-0432



Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au> on 04/26/99 06:29:17 PM

To:   Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
cc:    (bcc: James Thatcher/Austin/IBM)
Subject:  Re: PRI - 10   abbreviations and acronyms





This is a question of comprehension: to what extent do people with
cognitive disabilities, dyslexia, etc., benefit from the expansion of
abbreviations and acronyms? Obviously, all readers can take advantage of
this feature, as it improves the readability of documents.

Unless there is evidence suggesting that such expansions do not
significantly benefit particular groups of users, I would recommend
against making any change to the priority of this checkpoint.

Received on Monday, 26 April 1999 21:02:34 UTC