This technique relates to the following sections of the guidelines:
Use the abbr and acronym elements to
expand
abbreviations.
Mark up abbreviations with abbr and use title
to indicate the expansion. Abbreviations must be marked
at every occurrence in the authored unit.
Acronyms and initialisms are types of abbreviations. An
acronym is an abbreviation made from the initial letters of a name or
phrase that contains several words and may be pronounced as
words. An initialism is the shortened form of a name or phrase made
from the initial
letters of words or syllables contained in that name or phrase. When
using HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1, initialisms and acronyms
may be marked up using the acronym
tag. XHTML 2.0 proposes eliminating the acronym
element in favor of
the more general abbr element.
Note that in cases where the direct expansion of the abbreviation is not well understood, the meaning of the abbreviation should be provided. For example, in English the abbreviation a.m. represents the Latin, ante meridiem which means "before noon".
| Visual
User Agents |
Most graphical user agents,
render text enclosed within an abbr or acronym
element with a dotted line below or surrounding it. Also, when the
mouse hovers over
the element, the expansion is displayed as a tool tip. |
| Internet Explorer 6 and below |
Items marked using the |
| JAWS 6.2 WindowEyes 5.0 Home Page Reader 3.04 |
These assistive technologies support the abbr and acronym
elements. They all can be set to speak the title attribute when these
elements are encountered. Within a given product the abbr and
acronym elements are rendered the same. |
These examples show how to use the abbr element
properly.
This example shows how to use the acronym element.