Understanding Abbreviations

In brief

Goal

Users can identify and learn what abbreviations mean.

What to do

Provide the expanded form of abbreviations to users.

Why it's important

Some people, including those with cognitive disabilities, may not understand the shortened form of words.

Intent of Abbreviations

The intent of this Success Criterion is to ensure that users can access the expanded form of abbreviations.

Benefits of Abbreviations

This Success Criterion may help people who:

• have difficulty decoding words;
• rely on screen magnifiers (magnification may reduce contextual cues);
• have limited memory;
• have difficulty using context to aid understanding.

Abbreviations may confuse some readers in different ways:

• Some abbreviations do not look like normal words and cannot be pronounced according to the usual rules of the language. For example, the English word "room" is abbreviated as "rm," which does not correspond to any English word or phoneme. The user has to know that "rm" is an abbreviation for the word "room" in order to say it correctly.
• Sometimes, the same abbreviation means different things in different contexts. For example, in the English sentence "Dr. Johnson lives on Boswell Dr.," the first "Dr." is an abbreviation for "Doctor" and the second instance is an abbreviation for the word "Drive" (a word that means "street"). Users must be able to understand the context in order to know what the abbreviations mean.
• Some acronyms spell common words but are used in different ways. For example, "JAWS" is an acronym for a screen reader whose full name is "Job Access with Speech." It is also a common English word referring to the part of the mouth that holds the teeth. The acronym is used differently than the common word.
• Some acronyms sound like common words but are spelled differently. For example, the acronym for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, S M I L, is pronounced like the English word "smile."

It would also help people with visual disabilities who:

• Lose context when zoomed-in with a screen magnifier

Examples of Abbreviations

An abbreviation whose expansion is provided the first time the abbreviation appears in the content

The name, "World Wide Web Consortium," appears as the first heading on the organization's home page. The abbreviation, "W3C," is enclosed in parentheses in the same heading.

A dictionary search form

A Web site includes a search form provided by an on-line acronym service. Users enter an acronym and the form returns a list of possible expansions from the sources that it searched.

A medical Web site

A medical Web site provides information for both doctors and patients. The site includes a set of cascading dictionaries; a very specialized medical dictionary is first, followed by a second medical dictionary for the general public. The cascade also includes a list of acronyms and abbreviations that are unique to the site, and finally there is a standard dictionary as well. The standard dictionary at the end of the list provides definitions for most words in the text. The specialized medical dictionary yields definitions of unusual medical terms. Definitions for words that appear in more than one dictionary are listed in the order of the cascade. The meaning of acronyms and abbreviations is provided by the list of acronyms and abbreviations.

Expanded forms of Abbreviations

The expanded form of each abbreviation is available in a programmatically determinable manner. User agents that speak the text can use the expanded form to announce the abbreviation. Other user agents might make the expanded form available as a tooltip or as contextual help for the abbreviation.

Resources for Abbreviations

• Acronym finder - You can search with the exact acronym, the beginning of the acronym, wildcards and reverse lookup.
• Abbreviations.com.

Techniques for Abbreviations