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Abbreviations can be problematic

Martin Underhill writes about the problems of using abbreviations such as NGL (“not gonna lie”) and how inaccessible these cultural shortcuts can be.

There is an official ‘fix’ for this in HTML: <abbr title="Not gonna lie">NGL</abbr>, but it doesn’t show a tooltip when a touchscreen user touches it, nor is it necessarily exposed in things like RSS feeds. It isn’t always announced to screen reader users, and it isn’t included in the browser’s tab index.

The best solution is simple: don’t abbreviate, and use the words. Or, if you must use an acronym multiple times, define the first appearance with brackets.

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