RE: [330] Acronyms and abbreviations

COMMENTS BELOW MARKED   GV:    

 

 

Gregg

 

 -- ------------------------------ 

Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. 

Professor - Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr.

Director - Trace R & D Center 

University of Wisconsin-Madison 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Joe Clark
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 12:57 PM
To: WAI-GL
Subject: Re: [330] Acronyms and abbreviations

 

 

> Here is what I came to:

 

Time to go back to the drawing board.

 

> Acronyms and abbreviations should be tied to a definition within the

> document to a definition externally.

 

Did anybody bother to read that sentence?

 

Take a second and read it now. All the way.

GV:   The work  "or"  was unintentionally omitted.  Sincere apologies.

See a problem there?

 

More generally, why are WAI and WCAG WG poised to force authors to link

every acronym and abbreviation in every document forever to glossaries,

which may not exist at all?

GV:  not sure if you meant "link" as in hyperlink - but if you read, 'tied'
just meant that they all had a meaning that was findable.

 

What HTML mechanism will be suggested for this technique? href is not an

attribute of the <abbr> and <acronym> elements. (Don't bother talking

about XHTML 2; it doesn't exist.)

GV:  this is not at the html specific level.  And the whole discussion was
not proposed as language for the guildelines - but as discussion.
Exploration of ideas.  

 

Why are WAI and WCAG WG obsessed with abbreviations and acronyms to the

extent that they propose the most overzealous methods conceivable to deal

with a very simple problem? 

GV:   Relax a bit.   There is concern over them because the cause things to
be hard to understand for many readers - including those who are not
disabled.  

 

We already have <abbr> and <acronym> markup

that could be handled quite well by adaptive technology. The existing

techniques have not been proven to be insufficient for actual people with

disabilities, for the primary reason that nobody except the most

conscientious standards-compliant authors even uses them.

 

GV:  Where they work - they are fine - and no one is suggesting they not be
used.  Where they do not - it is a problem.   Also it is a lot of work.  We
have been trying to see if there are things that are easier to do as well.  

 

Again - the email was not proposed language.  It was text to help explore
the topic.

 

Also obsessions usually dominate a persons attention.   This is just one of
a long list of things being discussed.    Where we don't have good
solutions, we discuss them more to see if something will pop out.   

 

As to - why we don't just cite HTML markup --  HTML solutions or language
are reserved for the technology specific guidelines.    In the main
guidelines we would talk about what needs to be done in ways that are not
technology specific.

 

END GV

 

 

> The method for this would be in technology specific techniques.  We should

> also define a semantic markup technique for ambiguous words and it could

> be used for this as well.   That would help solve problems with whether a

> word is a word or acronym or proper name etc.

 

The proposal continues to assume the readers are unfamiliar with the

subject-matter of the page and will be unaware of the abbreviations and

acronyms used. In fact, many authors create pages for other people with

similar expertise; they don't need abbreviations and acronyms spelled out

for them, let alone linked to dictionaries that, I reiterate, may not

actually exist.

 

GV:  the purpose of this was to explore the idea of having definitions
(formal and informal - ie created by the author) that could be found if the
reader did not understand something.

 

The thrust of WAI and WCAG WG's approach is to make two tiny components of

a subset of the pages on the Web-- abbreviations and acronyms on the pages

that use them-- understandable to every single reader.

 

GV: Actually, if you read the thread, it was to make all information on the
page understandable.   Abbreviation and acronyms are just part of the
problem.  

 

Question 1: Why, exactly? Who said that everybody had to understand every

page, disabled or not?

GV:  No one.   But the guideline - which is not required - is to help people
understand what they can do if they WANT to do this.

 

Question 2: Why pick on something small like abbreviations and acronyms?

GV:  See above.  They are just part of a broader topic. 

-- 

 

  Joe Clark  |  joeclark@joeclark.org

  Author, _Building Accessible Websites_

  <http://joeclark.org/access/> | <http://joeclark.org/book/>