Re: REF 3.2 Change "unambiguously" to "first listing".

The problem with this is that you then need to clarify which are unabridged
dictionaries. For French as spoken in France, Castellano as spoken in Spain,
Icelandic, there are official dictionaries of the language defined by
standards bodies. But for most languages, including english, and even most
speakers of french and spanish, there is no such thing.

Given that WCAG is not a group of language experts, it might be better to
skip the discussion of dictionaries and simply require that abbreviations are
annotated with an unambiguous expanded form. In practice this will lead to
people not expanding "radar" or "laser", probably not expanding "HiFi",
"etc", "Smic" (fr), "Anzac"  (en-au / en-nz) or "p/l" (en-gb) "Spa" (it) "Pty
ltd" (en-au) "inc" (en-us), perhaps expanding "p.e" (it, es, fr) and
using "for example" instead of "eg" (la, used widely in en) and generally
expanding "ABC", "CoI", "HeKL", "EAC", "inf" and so on.

We should be aware that ambiguity is not inherent only in abbreviations. If
we are going to have a big row, we need more context, and to decide whether
we mean a file (but where is the metal?) or not.

I suspect that before we try to cook this checkpoint we should ask the
techniques group to come up with a couple of hundred examples taken from
websites in english, and prefereably a few hundred more in other languages,
so some people with reasonably substantial linguistic expertise can sit down
and work out what amiguities can be resolved, and how, and thence derive the
requirements.

Chaals

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Gregg Vanderheiden wrote:

>REF  3.2  Change "unambiguously" to "first listing".
>
>We currently state that acronyms and abbreviations must appear unambiguously
>in unabridged dictionaries.  Unabridged dictionaries can have so many
>different words and phrases that I'm not sure that unambiguously is
>sufficient.  It may be too tough a test.
>
>I suggest instead that we simply say that if it is not the "first" item in
>standard unabridged dictionaries for the language, then it should be
>expanded.

Received on Sunday, 13 July 2003 07:42:34 UTC