Newsletter and Grammar Coach

Abbreviations and acronyms are like those ride-sharing rental scooters parked on the sidewalks of many cities nowadays: handy to take you from here to there in a hurry, but a nuisance for drivers and pedestrians, and they can be downright troublesome for people who are blind or visually impaired.

Compression of a group of words into a few representative letters reduces wordiness. Such condensations can be classified into three main types:

1. abbreviation — any shortened form of a word, such as “Blvd.” for “Boulevard”
2. initialism — an abbreviation consisting of the first letter of each word in a name or phrase
3. acronym — an initialism that can be pronounced as a word.

The 28 letters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation crunch down to the three-letter initialism “FBI.” The 21-letter title “chief executive officer” is commonly abbreviated as “CEO.” Some lengthy terms are distilled into pronounceable acronyms, including “COBRA” for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, and “FEMA” for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

While sighted people recognize and understand such initialisms and acronyms, they can be problematic for screen reading technology used by people who are blind or visually impaired. By means of speech synthesis, assistive hardware devices and software applications read digital text aloud at a high rate of speed, far faster than people talk, and even faster than many sighted people can read printed text.

Screen reading applications differ in their interpretation of some types of content, notably abbreviations and acronyms. Most assistive screen readers recognize capitalized initialisms and pronounce them accordingly as separate letters — for example, “eff bee eye” for FBI. At the same time, sophisticated instructions and a comprehensive built-in dictionary enable screen reading applications to pronounce an acronym such as FEMA as a word: “fee-muh.” And some screen readers are sophisticated enough to recognize “etc.” as an abbreviation and enunciate it as “et cetera.”

But unfamiliar abbreviations can cause a screen reading application to stumble. Website designers and marketers, for instance, commonly refer to the term “search engine optimization” as “SEO,” which they articulate letter by letter: “ess-ee-oh.” Screen reading software that had not previously encountered that term could mistakenly enunciate it as a word: “see-oh.” Teachers and parents refer to an “individualized education program” by the abbreviation “IEP,” with each letter articulated, but a screen reader might inadvertently enunciate it as a word that sounds like “yep.” Discussion about investment earnings might include the term “APY,” which speech synthesis might articulate as “ah-pee” rather than sounding out the three letters that represent “annual percentage yield.” The initialism “COB” is often used in business contexts to refer to the time for “close of business,” but a screen reader might interpret it as the word “cob.”

Most screen reading applications include a pronunciation dictionary, which users can customize to either spell out abbreviations letter by letter or to read familiar and recurring acronyms as words. Problems are most likely to occur when screen readers encounter a pronounceable abbreviation for the first time. Abbreviations that smartphone users concocted to economize on thumb taps in texting have propagated into websites and documents that likely were created with full keyboards.

You can help reduce problems with abbreviations by first spelling out the full name or phrase — for example “return on equity (ROE).” That’s helpful not only for people with visual impairments, but also for sighted readers.

Another approach is to create a “screen tip” that spells out an abbreviation when the user hovers over it. To create a screen tip in Microsoft Word, follow this eight-step process:

1. Use your cursor to highlight the abbreviation or acronym.
2. Click the “insert” top menu item, scroll down, and select “bookmark.”
3. Type the abbreviation as the name of the bookmark.
4. While the acronym remains highlighted, click on the “insert” menu again and select “hyperlink.”
5. In the upper right corner of the dialog box click “ScreenTip” and then type the fully spelled-out term for the abbreviation.
6. Click the “This document” button.
7. Under the resultant “Bookmarks” heading select your named bookmark.
8. Click “OK.”

A similar pop-up can be added to text on web pages, using an HTML script. It’s too lengthy too describe here, but your web designer can help you with that.

To prompt screen readers to interpret abbreviations as separate letters rather than sounding them out as words, use periods between letters. By doing so, “U.K.” will be enunciated as “yoo-kay” rather than “uck.”

If you’re preparing a Microsoft Word document in which you want screen readers to interpret acronyms as words, follow these steps:

1. Type any acronym in lowercase (for example, “fafsa” for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid).
2. Highlight the acronym.
3. Click the “format” menu, and select “font.”
4. In the “font” dialog box, click the “all caps” box. If you’re handy with Microsoft Word’s “styles” function, you can make a new “all caps” character style shortcut.

To sighted readers, the selected text will appear as uppercase characters (FAFSA), but screen readers will interpret them as if they were lowercase, and thus pronounce the acronym as a word (faff-suh).

Anticipating how screen readers are likely to interpret abbreviations in your text will help your content be more accessible and understandable to a wider readership.

California earthquake insurance claims expert Dan Dyce had very little time after hours to concentrate on his career progression. What he did have was a plan: he systematically began taking advantage of a portion of his lunch hours to nurture his career as well as his digestive system. He used the time constructively to strategize and prepare for his career advancement.

The unexpected death of Nancy Belle Wood’s husband sent her into a deep spiral of grief, isolation and depression. But over the coming months she gradually navigated around the fires burning in her soul and emerged changed but whole.

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Gregg L. wrote:

“Are the phrases ‘in behalf of’ and ‘on behalf of’ interchangeable? I think that they have different meanings but I always hesitate before using one or the other.”

The grammar coach replies:

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