Re: Question on abbreviations (fwd)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert@crosslink.net>


> AP is a nice stylebook to use, but it was written for paper publications
> not the web.

If you can't reconcile your rules with AP Style, you're going to block out
every American news outlet from meeting accessibility standards.

> FBI may be universally known to American adults, but
> offers nary a clue to a youngster or someone from another English-speaking
> country.

What if my audience is exclusively American? Would I need to expand a term I
expect the whole of my audience to understand? Think about courseware for
law or med school. I would expect a med school student to comprehend q.i.d.
as "four times a day" in a class, and leaving out that definition would (or
should) not impact usability or accessibility for my audience.

> Online dictionaries exist, and I have on occassion seen pages that link to
> dictionary definitions for specific terms, but it is rarely done. For some
> sites, such as the WAI, definitions are needed that may not fit dictionary
> terms but fit the use made of the term in the guidelines (e.g. the word
> "style"). But the online dictionaries and encyclopedia are there, and if
> they can be linked from sites, we are already much of the way there. The
> rules can be simple: either link to an outside source, or put in your own
> definitions on a site/page, but do give the user a chance to understand
you.

I'm mostly here with you. But I see problems with putting the onus on
content providers to define already well-defined terms. The solution I see
is a user-agent enhancement that lets users tie their own dictionaries,
online or integrated, into the agent. They can create a trusted authority
for defining terms, which could be overridden by the ABBR or ACRONYM tags in
HTML, for example, to provide a list of possible definitions. Then, WCAG can
state that content providers are only responsible for defining terms they
introduce or use uniquely.
The potential for proliferation of untrusted definitions, which may
ultimately be made useless by such a system (if they're not useless to begin
with), gives me pause. Do we really want to tell people to search and
replace all their acronyms and abbreviations, and then once a system like
this comes along, say, never mind, just put it back the way it was?

Received on Thursday, 28 December 2000 15:43:55 UTC