Re: Question on abbreviations (fwd)

Matt,

	Taking your points:

At 12:43 PM 12/28/00 -0800, Matt May wrote:
>If you can't reconcile your rules with AP Style, you're going to block out
>every American news outlet from meeting accessibility standards.

Not really. The American news outlets are capable of undertanding that the
web needs different rules than print. Because of the interactive
capabilities of the web, the AP style may need to be adapted for the web.
In response to your comment in the next paragraph, NO American news outlet
should be defining their audience as exclusively American. This is the
"World Wide Web", not the American Web. 

>> 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.

An author who can precisely define his audience so as to KNOW that certain
acronyms or abbreviations are known, would not need to meet "accessibility"
standards other than as needed by that known audience. If a med or law or
HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) prof is making a web
document for students, it is likely that the document prepared for first
year students will have different definition needs that a document for
third-year students. But most of the time, it seems web designers don't
match up well to their full audience. It doesn't matter whether the web
designer "sins" by leaving out alt tags or by leaving out expansions and
definitions, they haven't done the job properly, they are not reaching all
of their audience. When they miss audience because of the disabilities of
the audience, including cognitive and reading disabilities, it is our job
to head 'em off at the pass! 

>> 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.

On the contrary, I feel it is exactly the content providers who should
define their terms. If the terms are already well-defined, all that is
needed is a link to the author's favorite dictionary, or if less
well-defined, a specialized dictionary. 

 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.

Ah, dumping the responsibility onto the user. Nice play! <grin> ...
Seriously, your description of the "trusted authority for defining terms"
took me back a decade to when I was a member of a panel examining an issue
of "book banning" at the school where I worked. The representative of the
clergy maintain, among other things, that he only "recognized" as
authoritative, a 19th century Webster version of the dictionary. The issue
was, interestingly, an expanded acrynym ... RTFM ... used in a book, The
Cuckoo's Egg which was supposed to be more fact than fiction about the
early Internet. The expansion, as a footnote on page 5, used the old
English "F" word to describe the Manual ... the only occurance of the word
(or any other inappropriate word) in the whole book! The reverend with the
narrow references won the day, the book was banned for classroom use, I was
personally vilified from the guy's pulpit for a few weeks. 

>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?

What do you mean by "put it back"? Once the terms are marked up, they can
be updated to newer technology. It's the unmarked up stuff that's the
problem, not the stuff that is linked one place, and can later be moved to
another. 

Matt, there is a real need to have page authors and content providers think
through what they are offering. Writing a web page isn't like writing
e-mail, and it isn't exactly like writing for publication, but more similar
to writing for publication than to writing e-mail. If you (the author) are
just adding another dust-collector to the web, have at it ... but if you
want to use it to communicate, you have to consider the difference between
web and paper, and you have to consider your widest audience.

						Anne 

				
Anne L. Pemberton
http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1
http://www.erols.com/stevepem/Homeschooling
apembert@crosslink.net
Enabling Support Foundation
http://www.enabling.org

Received on Thursday, 28 December 2000 16:47:26 UTC