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Accessibility testing for dev teams - No experience required
Compliance Data & Impact
Disabilities Affected
- Blind
- Low Vision
- Deafblind
Requirement(s)
- User Agent Issue
WCAG Success Criteria
- 1.3.1 Info and Relationships
- 3.1.3 Unusual Words
- 3.1.4 Abbreviations
Section 508 Guidelines
- 1194.31.e Speech accessibility
- 1194.21 (a) Programmatically-discernable text
How to Fix the Problem
Either disregard or correct as necessary.
This rule automatically detects acronyms known to potentially be problematic according to TalkBack's text-to-speech engine and warn you to this effect. TalkBack's handling of acronyms includes automatic expansion of acronyms and abbreviations which can be inaccurate (for example, by converting 'm' to 'meters' when minutes is intended) and cause misinformation.
By changing the content description but not the visible text of the text view, you can avoid having to change the user interface, while still presenting the information to TalkBack users in a way that isn’t confusing.
For offending acronyms, provide the proper expansion or spacing in the label's content description.
Offending vs. Suspected Severity Note:
For offending acronyms, the severity is Critical. For suspected acronyms, the severity is Minor.
For all uses of shorthand letters for acronyms or common letter word substitutions (m = minutes), double-check that TalkBack is announcing it correctly. There are two acceptable pronunciations. One is that the text gets read out verbatim, the other is that the text gets read out in its accurate expanded form. Additionally, double-check the spacing does not change it to an unintended meaning. For example, “45m 15s” can read out as “45 m 15 s” or “45 minutes 15 seconds.” However, “45 meters fifteens” is not acceptable.
Why it Matters
TalkBack screen reader users can potentially receive unintended, invalid expanded acronym information read to them as definitions of common acronyms when a less common expanded acronym definition is intended, yet not expressly conveyed.
For example, users who are not familiar with TalkBack will not understand that strings can be explored by sentence/word/character, and will only hear “5m” as “five meters” and not know that it is instead intended to convey five minutes.
Rule Description
The Algorithm (in simple terms)
Searches all TalkBack spoken strings for presence of shorthand elements that will not be represented properly by Android’s TTS Engine.
Resources
Deque University Course Pages (subscription required)
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