Stanford Online Accessibility Program

Acronym and Abbreviations

Use the <acronym> or <abbr> elements to expand short forms in your documents. E.g.:

A screen reader will speak this as "the it manager..." and not as "the eye-tee manager..." which is what a sighted person reading it would understand. The following code will make the expanded information available to those who want or need it:

<p>The <acronym title="Information Technology”>IT</acronym> manager is responsible for delivering the system.</p>

You can test this now in MS Internet Explorer 5 or later, Netscape 7 or later or Opera v.6 or later. Put the mouse cursor over some text marked up with the acronym or abbr tag and you will see the title= text string appear as a "tool-tip".

The IT manager is responsible for delivering the system.

On this site, we've also added some styling to the acronym element:

acronym {
border-bottom: 1px dotted;
cursor:help;
}

(Note: the support for the <abbr> element is not universal, and so the <acronym> element is preferred)

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