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<title>Day 17: Defining acronyms - Dive Into Accessibility</title>
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<h2 class="entrysubject">Day 17: Defining acronyms</h2>
<p class="firstparagraph">I used 50 acronyms and abbreviations on my own weblog last month: <acronym title="Americans With Disabilities Act">ADA</acronym>,
<acronym title="alternate">ALT</acronym>,
<acronym title="America Online">AOL</acronym>,
<acronym title="application interface">API</acronym>,
<acronym title="common gateway interface">CGI</acronym>,
<acronym title="content management system">CMS</acronym>,
<acronym title="cascading style sheet">CSS</acronym>,
<acronym title="control">CTRL</acronym>,
<acronym title="Department of Motor Vehicles">DMV</acronym>,
<acronym title="domain name system">DNS</acronym>,
<acronym title="document type definition">DTD</acronym>,
<acronym title="Electronic Frontier Foundation">EFF</acronym>,
<acronym title="Frequently Asked Questions list">FAQ</acronym>,
<acronym title="Free Software Foundation">FSF</acronym>,
<acronym title="GNU Free Documentation License">GFDL</acronym>,
<acronym title="Gemological Institute of America">GIA</acronym>,
<acronym title="GNU General Public License">GPL</acronym>,
<acronym title="hypertext markup language">HTML</acronym>,
<acronym title="Internet Explorer">IE</acronym>,
<acronym title="if I remember correctly">IIRC</acronym>,
<acronym title="Internet Infomation Server">IIS</acronym>,
<acronym title="Instant Outlining">IO</acronym>,
<acronym title="kilobytes">KB</acronym>,
<acronym title="K Desktop Environment">KDE</acronym>,
<acronym title="long description">LONGDESC</acronym>,
<acronym title="megabyte">MB</acronym>,
<acronym title="Microsoft Developer Network">MSDN</acronym>,
<acronym title="Microsoft Network">MSN</acronym>,
<acronym title="Movable Type">MT</acronym>,
<acronym title="Macintosh">Mac</acronym>,
<acronym title="North Carolina">NC</acronym>,
<acronym title="Outline Processor Markup Language">OPML</acronym>,
<acronym title="Peer To Peer">P2P</acronym>,
<acronym title="page down">PGDN</acronym>,
<acronym title="page up">PGUP</acronym>,
<acronym title="Public Broadcasting System">PBS</acronym>,
<acronym title="portable document format">PDF</acronym>,
<acronym title="Perceivable, Operable, Navigable, Understandable, Robust">PONUR</acronym>,
<acronym title="Rich Site Summary">RSS</acronym>,
<acronym title="Radio Userland">RU</acronym>,
<acronym title="Simple Object Access Protocol">SOAP</acronym>,
<acronym title="social security number">SSN</acronym>,
<acronym title="telecommunications device for the deaf">TDD</acronym>,
<acronym title="United States">US</acronym>,
<acronym title="Virtual Network Computing">VNC</acronym>,
<acronym title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</acronym>,
<acronym title="Web Content Accessibility Guidelines">WCAG</acronym>,
<acronym title="what you see is what you get">WYSIWYG</acronym>,
<acronym title="Windows">Win</acronym>,
<acronym title="extensible hypertext markup language">XHTML</acronym>, and
<acronym title="eXtensible Markup Language">XML</acronym>.</p>
<p>If you recognize all 50, congratulations; you have a long and prosperous future as a technical editor. If not, you'll appreciate the fact that I defined each of them with the <code class="sgmltag"><acronym></code> tag. Hover your cursor over each acronym to see what it stands for. This works in all modern browsers, and is harmless in Netscape 4.</p>
<p>You should define an acronym whenever you use it, or at least once per post.</p>
<h3>Who benefits?</h3>
<ol>
<li><a href="day_2_michael.html">Michael</a> benefits. When Michael hovers his cursor over an acronym, <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a> displays the acronym title as a tooltip.</li>
<li><a href="day_3_bill.html">Bill</a> benefits. <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/">Mozilla</a> goes even further, automatically rendering acronyms with a dotted underline. When Bill hovers his cursor over the acronym, Mozilla changes the cursor to a cursor + question mark, and then displays the acronym title as a tooltip. (You can override this default behavior with cascading style sheets, or use <acronym title="cascading style sheets">CSS</acronym> to get a similar effect in other browsers.)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> benefits. Google indexes the acronym title as well as the acronym itself, so people can find your site whether they search for the acronym or the spelled-out description.</li>
<li>I wish I could say that <a href="day_1_jackie.html">Jackie</a> benefits, but she doesn't. Neither <a href="http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp">JAWS</a> nor any of the other screen readers on the market currently support reading the titles of acronyms. I hope some day they will, and then you'll be ahead of the game.</li>
</ol>
<h3>How to do it</h3>
<p>The first time you use an acronym, mark it up with an <code class="sgmltag"><acronym></code> tag, like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><code class="sgmltag"><acronym title="cascading style sheets">CSS</acronym></code></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Radio users can automate this markup by using shortcuts. From your Radio home page, click "Shortcuts" in the main navigation menu, then define the acronyms you use frequently. For example:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Name: <kbd>CSS</kbd></p>
<p>Value: <kbd><acronym title="cascading style sheets">CSS</acronym></kbd></p>
<p>(Be sure to change the input type from "<acronym title="what you see is what you get">WYSIWYG</acronym>" to "Source" so you can type the <acronym title="hypertext markup language">HTML</acronym> directly.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then, in your post, simply type "CSS" (with the quotes), and Radio will render it with the acronym tag and the title, just as you defined it.</p>
<h3>How to do it: cascading style sheets</h3>
<p>As an added bonus, you can change the look of all your acronyms using cascading style sheets. This works in all tools, not just Radio. Here is the rule I use to produce the dotted underline in all browsers (not just Mozilla):</p>
<blockquote>
<pre><code>acronym {
border-bottom: 1px dotted black;
}</code></pre>
</blockquote>
<p>And as an extra bonus, this is the rule I use in my print stylesheet to automatically spell out acronyms when printing my web pages. (This only works when printing from Mozilla and Opera, but it's harmless in other browsers.)</p>
<blockquote>
<pre><code>acronym:after {
content: " (" attr(title) ")";
}</code></pre>
</blockquote>
<h3>Further reading</h3>
<p>Have you been using acronyms without knowing what they mean? Look them up.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.acronymfinder.com/">Acronym Finder</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.ucc.ie/acronyms/">Acronym Database</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.acronymsearch.com/">Acronym Search</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Postscript</h3>
<p>Several fellow markup-obsessed gurus have correctly pointed out that there is an <code class="sgmltag"><abbr></code> tag for abbreviations. Unfortunately, no version of Internet Explorer for Windows supports it; no tooltips show up at all. Use <code class="sgmltag"><acronym></code>.</p>
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