<abbr></abbr>
Hi guys, me again. 
My next query relates to <abbr>. Is there an agreed code for translating letters, i.e.CSS into an understandable format for screen readers such as I = eye.
Thank you
Mike Abbott
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Mike,
Not quite sure what you're trying to do ... could you furnish an example?
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Yes Nathan
When using letters to abbreviate organisations e.g. BBC or NIOSH, I understand that screen readers will not pronounce these properly and we have to use an <abbr title="**">**</abbr> instruction. With an acronym e.g.NASA, the reader will pronounce correctly with an <acronym> instruction.
Bye the way, how's the weather in Denver?
Cheers
Mike Abbott
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| Mikea wrote: |
| When using letters to abbreviate organisations e.g. BBC or NIOSH, I understand that screen readers will not pronounce these properly and we have to use an <abbr title="**">**</abbr> instruction. |
True. Use of the <abbr> tag will (should) cause screen readers to read aloud each individual letter in the abbreviation. In your example (BBC), this would become "bee bee cee".
| Quote: |
| With an acronym e.g.NASA, the reader will pronounce correctly with an <acronym> instruction. |
It should (at least that's the idea behind it), but language being the strange beast that it is, how should the screen reader actually read NASA? After all, the proximity of the vowels could also indicate that the A's are pronounced with the long vowel sound (like in NATO). Screen readers may have some luck with the more common acronyms, but I'd imagine that the more esoteric they become the worse their pronunciation by screen readers also becomes.
Hopefully this answers your question ... if not, let me know and I'll try again!
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| Bye the way, how's the weather in Denver? |
Gorgeous! It's supposed to be mid-70s today, perfectly sunny, and a perfect day for a quick putt on the ole' motorcycle. Of course, if you're really a Californian posing as someone from the UK, the weather is actually cloudy, snowing, with an 80% chance of Armageddon ... we've got too many Californians here as it is!
Last edited by Nathan on 24 Sep 2003 03:59 pm; edited 1 time in total
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As I look out onto a wonderfully sunny but cool day in Corby I would like to thank you for confiming my thoughts.
What I would like to know is what to write down as the phonetic pronunciation for each letter of the alphabet. Some are easy I = eye D = dee C = see, but what about others, how do we pronounce A or M?
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Mike Abbott
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Surely the use of the title attribute should be to say what the abbreviation stands for, not phonetically spell it out?
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Daz, can you explain in a bit more detail please.
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Mike Abbott
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Mike, the way I use it is for an abbreviation like BBC, my code would look like this <abbr title="British Broadcasting Corporation">BBC</abbr>.
Now if I understand correctly, your intention is to use it like this
<abbr title="Bee Bee Cee">BBC</abbr> so that a screenreader pronounces it correctly. That's defeating the purpose of the tag, the tag's use is not only for semantic markup but by using the title attribute you can explain what an abbreviation means.
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You should probably read this page:
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/acrobot/why-you-should-use-acronyms-and-abbreviations.asp
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Thank you Daz and Ian. It confirms to a certain extent what I had thought.
At the moment I have not stretched to website devlopment but are converting internal documents to HTML 4.01 transitional so they can be piggybacked onto our website. As I use a lot of abbreviations it seems pointless in having to repeat, for instance,
<abbr title="Health and Safety Executive">HSE</abbr> for every occurance, this is why I want to use phontetic pronunciation.
For single or occasional repeats then a full title would be appropriate but for multiple uses it seems overkill to keep repeating the whole lot when the user should understand the abbreviation after being given the full. Could we think of this as a useability topic
Thanks
Mike Abbott
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My take on this is if you use an abbreviation more than once on a page then first time you spell it out in full with the abbreviation in brackets, for example - Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Then thereafter I think it's perfectly acceptable to use HSE on that page without the abbr tag. However, there are instances were you might not spell it out in the context of the sentence and there I would use the abbr tag.
You have to appreciate that not everyone will come to your site via the homepage so it's important that where an abbreviation is firstly used and you don't use the abbr tag then you should spell it out in full.
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Sorry to sound ignorant but would a screen reader understand the abbreviation without the <abbr> tag?Mike Abbott
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No, if your abbreviation was HSE, thats what it would read out, the letters H-S-E. It's just from a user friendly point of view if you like, it's better to give what HSE stands for. This works for the user that needs a screenread and the user without. Ian's link describes how this works and there's a great piece of script Jason Davis did for getting the abbr tag to act like the acronym tag in IE here - http://www.accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=137
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Thanks Daz. I did not appreciate how a screen reader works. Makes my life easier.Mike Abbott
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Mike, download Jaws for Windows, there's a free 40min trial version which will give you a good introduction to how one of the most popular screenreaders works.
Here's the link - http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/jaws.asp
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