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

[Robert J Burns]

Hi Leif,

Isn't it ironic the way Ian says he's trying to help users by reducing  
the verbosity of headers queries by forcing the reduced complexity of  
tables (actually making complex tables completely inaccessible) and  
thereby reducing the number of headers associated with a data cell,  
while at the same time he eliminates the abbr attribute which is  
designed to reduce verbosity in a information lossless way.

My view is that the abbr attribute is needed and that there's no  
reason to eliminate it. My understanding is also that it is fairly  
well supported by assistive tech UAs.

Take care,
Rob

On Aug 24, 2008, at 4:05 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> HTML 4 has the @abbr for table cells, aimed at screen readers,
> primerely. It is sofar not included n HTML 5. Should it be kept?
>
> With a reference to the discussion I, Rob and Jason lead about "short
> @alt" versus "@longdesc" etc,  I would describe @abbr as a "short text
> equivalent of of an table header cell".
>
> 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.
>
> Here are the HTML 4 code examples with @abbr:
>
>    * <TH id="t3" abbr="Type">Type of Coffee</TH>
>    * <TH scope="col" abbr="Name">Course Name</TH>
>    * <TH scope="col" abbr="Tutor">Course Tutor</TH>
>
> I was reminded about this issue when I saw Gez's table demonstration
> (for the cause of allowing @headers to point to data cells). [1] There
> Gez has used the ABBR element in 3 of the headings.  But as you can  
> see
> from the code examples above, the @abbr and <ABBR> works differently.
>
> The @abbr reminds me a lot about @label for <OPTION>. (Opera  only  
> added
> support for <option @lable> in Opera 9.5.). Here is what HTML 4 says
> about <option @lable>:
>
>    * label = text [CS]
>      This attribute allows authors to specify a shorter label for an
>      option than the content of the OPTION element. When specified,
>      user agents should use the value of this attribute rather than  
> the
>      content of the OPTION element as the option label.
>
>
> This is what the prose of HTML 4 says about @abbr (note that HTML 4  
> also
> see a use case for visual agents):
>
> DTD
>
>    * abbr        %Text;         #IMPLIED  -- abbreviation for header
>      cell --
>
> Prose:
>
>    * abbr = text [CS]
>      This attribute should be used to provide an abbreviated form of
>      the cell's content, and may be rendered by user agents when
>      appropriate in place of the cell's content. Abbreviated names
>      should be short since user agents may render them repeatedly. For
>      instance, speech synthesizers may render the abbreviated headers
>      relating to a particular cell before rendering that cell's  
> content.
>    * The TH element defines a cell that contains header information.
>      User agents have two pieces of header information available: the
>      contents of the TH element and the value of the abbr attribute.
>      User agents must render either the contents of the cell or the
>      value of the abbr attribute. For visual media, the latter may be
>      appropriate when there is insufficient space to render the full
>      contents of the cell. For non-visual media abbr may be used as an
>      abbreviation for table headers when these are rendered along with
>      the contents of the cells to which they apply.
>    * [non-visual UAs:] The abbr attribute specifies an abbreviated
>      header for header cells so that user agents may render header
>      information more rapidly.
>
>
> [1] http://juicystudio.com/wcag/tables/complexdatatable.html
> -- 
> leif halvard silli
>
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