Those crazy Mormons

Alex · 11-12-2008, 12:08 PM

The acronym, initialism, abbreviation debate takes me back to a bad place. A place in time where a very large web site (no, not MousePlanet) made the decision to be completely screen reader compliant and therefore we had to appropriately tag every one on our site so a screen reader would know to say I R S and not urz. Or to say nafta instead of N A F T A.

Whole meetings spend on edge cases (yes, the myth of the hyper-efficient megacorporation is just that) where something started out as an initialism but was moving into acronym land (IRA). Or has it moved so far from its roots that the average person no longer even knows it was an acronym (such as laser) and is now just a word.

And much wailing and gnashing of teeth over TIAA-CREF, JPEG, SFMOMA, and (the first half of each are initialisms, the second acronyms).

Eventually we just took the easy way out and killed all the lawyers making us do the useless exercise (since most screen readers, even when being told to read SQL as an acronym still didn't know how to pronounce it).

11-12-2008, 12:08 PM	#26
Alex . Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 13,354	The acronym, initialism, abbreviation debate takes me back to a bad place. A place in time where a very large web site (no, not MousePlanet) made the decision to be completely screen reader compliant and therefore we had to appropriately tag every one on our site so a screen reader would know to say I R S and not urz. Or to say nafta instead of N A F T A. Whole meetings spend on edge cases (yes, the myth of the hyper-efficient megacorporation is just that) where something started out as an initialism but was moving into acronym land (IRA). Or has it moved so far from its roots that the average person no longer even knows it was an acronym (such as laser) and is now just a word. And much wailing and gnashing of teeth over TIAA-CREF, JPEG, SFMOMA, and (the first half of each are initialisms, the second acronyms). Eventually we just took the easy way out and killed all the lawyers making us do the useless exercise (since most screen readers, even when being told to read SQL as an acronym still didn't know how to pronounce it).
	Submit to Quotes