Re: Fwd from Brian Hardy: Your comments on WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft of December, 2007

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Brian Hardy
<Brian.Hardy@visionaustralia.org> wrote:

>   I am not sure you have understood my point about Acronyms (Comment 13:
>   Missing Success Criteria - Acronyms).
>   I know Acronyms were included in the definition of abbreviations. The
>   difficulty is that the success criteria do not address the problem that
>   screen readers have with understanding how to convey the meaning
>   correctly by an appropriate voice rendering. This is a completely
>   different issue to the need to expand abbreviations.  I still believe
>   that adding an additional success criterion, along the lines I
>   suggested, would be an important improvement.
>
>   Pronouncing your ESP example as a "word" would make the content hard to
>   understand, even if in the first incidence of the "word" it had been
>   fully expanded. In common speech, each letter of ESP is pronounced and
>   it should be the same for screen reader users reading web content.
>
>   It is easy to enable assistive technology to identify acronyms and
>   pronounce each letter (if that is appropriate).

Not every acronym is pronounced by pronouncing each letter, e.g.,
radar is an acronym for "radio detecting and ranging" and laser is an
acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation".
While SC 3.1.3 may assist text-to-speech systems in pronouncing the
abbreviation, the goal of the success criterion is to be sure that the
meaning is available.

Received on Friday, 21 March 2008 23:30:50 UTC