Re: [330] Acronyms and abbreviations

> Here is what I came to:

Time to go back to the drawing board.

> Acronyms and abbreviations should be tied to a definition within the
> document to a definition externally.

Did anybody bother to read that sentence?

Take a second and read it now. All the way.

See a problem there?

More generally, why are WAI and WCAG WG poised to force authors to link
every acronym and abbreviation in every document forever to glossaries,
which may not exist at all?

What HTML mechanism will be suggested for this technique? href is not an
attribute of the <abbr> and <acronym> elements. (Don't bother talking
about XHTML 2; it doesn't exist.)

Why are WAI and WCAG WG obsessed with abbreviations and acronyms to the
extent that they propose the most overzealous methods conceivable to deal
with a very simple problem? We already have <abbr> and <acronym> markup
that could be handled quite well by adaptive technology. The existing
techniques have not been proven to be insufficient for actual people with
disabilities, for the primary reason that nobody except the most
conscientious standards-compliant authors even uses them.

> The method for this would be in technology specific techniques.  We should
> also define a semantic markup technique for ambiguous words and it could
> be used for this as well.   That would help solve problems with whether a
> word is a word or acronym or proper name etc.

The proposal continues to assume the readers are unfamiliar with the
subject-matter of the page and will be unaware of the abbreviations and
acronyms used. In fact, many authors create pages for other people with
similar expertise; they don't need abbreviations and acronyms spelled out
for them, let alone linked to dictionaries that, I reiterate, may not
actually exist.

The thrust of WAI and WCAG WG's approach is to make two tiny components of
a subset of the pages on the Web-- abbreviations and acronyms on the pages
that use them-- understandable to every single reader.

Question 1: Why, exactly? Who said that everybody had to understand every
page, disabled or not?

Question 2: Why pick on something small like abbreviations and acronyms?

-- 

  Joe Clark  |  joeclark@joeclark.org
  Author, _Building Accessible Websites_
  <http://joeclark.org/access/> | <http://joeclark.org/book/>

Received on Saturday, 23 August 2003 02:57:47 UTC