Re: CART acronym needed or link good?

Common best practice is to mark up each instance as an acronym but
only expand it with a title attribute for the first instance.
Depending on screen reader settings acronym title attributes replace
the contents in a similar way to alt attributes on images. This is the
main reason why it is recommended to only apply the title to the first
instance - this expanded acronym would be cumbersome to hear every
time in this document. In long documents with multiple sections it
might be prudent to repeat it at regular intervals, but I don't think
this page qualifies.

The current markup may not be quite right though, as screen readers
with acronyms expanded will read

<acronym title="Computer Aided Real-Time Captioning or Communication
Access Realtime Translation"><a class="termref" href="#cart">CART</a>
writer</acronym>

as 'Computer Aided Real-Time Captioning or Communication Access
Realtime Translation' (missing the 'writer' at the end) rather than
'Computer Aided Real-Time Captioning or Communication Access Realtime
Translation writer'.

If you intend the 'writer' text to be read in all cases then either:

<acronym title="Computer Aided Real-Time Captioning or Communication
Access Realtime Translation"><a class="termref"
href="#cart">CART</a></acronym> writer

or

<a class="termref" href="#cart"><acronym title="Computer Aided
Real-Time Captioning or Communication Access Realtime
Translation">CART</acronym> writer</a>

would be better, depending on whether you want 'writer' to be part of
the link or not. As you have not included 'writer' in every instance
then possibly the first is more correct and consistent.

Regards,

Ian.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 10:37 PM, Shawn Henry <shawn@w3.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just noticed this in the minutes from last week:
>        <sinarmaya> Please, mark as an acronym the "CART" term ;-)
> for the document at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/accessible
>
> The acronym is "Computer Aided Real–Time Captioning or Communication Access
> Realtime Translation". I'm not sure it is best to have that marked up each
> time. I was thinking because each instance links to the definition in the
> Terminology section where it is explained, then that would be sufficient.
>
> EOWG, What do you think?
>
> ~Shawn
>
>

Received on Friday, 23 April 2010 00:13:29 UTC