[html4all] @abbr, short TH fallback for screen readers

[Jason White]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 03:05:09AM +0200, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
 
> Are there User Agents who support this attribute? Do you think it is 
> worth keeping? It makes sense to me: For traversal of a table, it should 
> be practical to be able to list abbreviated TH content rather than the 
> full content.

There are cases in braille where tables cannot be formatted spatially if the
full headers are given, but a spatial layout is possible with abbreviated
headers. Usually, there is a "key" included which specifies the abbreviations
used and the corresponding full text.

I can envisage similar usages involving devices with small screens, or
enlarged fonts.

There is new XML to braille software available that might be able to support
this, given suitable style rules, but it definitely isn't a feature that can
be readily supported today, regrettably.

I expect screen readers could implement it given support from the relevant
accessibility APIs.

Arguably this doesn't belong in CSS or any other style language; it is part of
the content rather than the presentation.