Ckeditor4: Provide support for Abbreviations or Acronyms

[mgifford]

Web Accessibility

CKEditor should really support a <abbr> button. This isn't a new issue.

https://dev.ckeditor.com/ticket/1374

Feature request

There should be a button that makes it easier to add a definition for an abbreviation

I've linked to it from this Drupal issue where I raised it earlier ​https://www.drupal.org/node/2307549

This is part of the ATAG standard B3 ​http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/#principle_b3

It should be easier to prompt users to insert abbreviations like: HTML

by looking for groups of all caps. This shouldn't be mandatory, but just a reminder that this will help users who may not be familiar with the jargon.

I would suggest: UNCED, CIDA, NATO - would prompt a user for a definition. unced, cida, Nato - would not.

[wwalc]

The abbreviation plugin is actually presented in a tutorial:
https://docs.ckeditor.com/ckeditor4/latest/guide/plugin_sdk_sample_1.html

You may see it live here:
https://sdk.ckeditor.com/samples/abbr.html

Source code:
https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor-docs-samples/tree/master/tutorial-abbr-acf/abbr

[mgifford]

Ok.. Any reason not to build it in by default? Would be great to have folks actually use it!

[fuzzbomb]

<acronym> was removed as of HTML5, so this should be narrowed to just be about <abbr>.

[mgifford]

I had used the term acronym when describing the problem, but the links that @wwalc provided give you
<abbr title="What You See Is What You Get">WYSIWYG</abbr>

[fuzzbomb]

Yeah that's good output from the SDK sample. Title attributes on ABBR tags are partially "accessibility supported" (a WCAG term).

Good: Several screen readers make ABBR title attributes available.

Bad: ABBR title attributes are not available to sighted keyboard-only users. Sighted mouse users get the title attribute on hover. Not sure about speech control or switch access users.

[mgifford]

"ABBR title attributes are not available to sighted keyboard-only users." - This sounds like a browser issue though.

[fuzzbomb]

Ok.. Any reason not to build it in by default? Would be great to have folks actually use it!

A big +100 to that.

ABBR is an element which survived in HTML5, and has good screen reader accessibility.

Having the ABBR button in the standard CKEditor build would be a great help for CMS (etc.) aiming to support:

WCAG 2.0 - success criterion 3.1.4 Abbreviations
ATAG 2.0 - guideline Principle B.2: Authors are supported in producing accessible content (applies to several sub-criteria).

[fuzzbomb]

Screen reader support for ABBR title attribute is attested here:

Using the HTML title attribute – updated

[mgifford]

That's from 2013 though.

It still doesn't seem there is even a report for how this is a problem for mobile & keyboard only users in browsers. So I added some:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=851250
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1468007

[fuzzbomb]

Yeah, it's the general problem of user-agents treating title attributes as a tooltip, but only for hover. Same for abbr as most other elements.

[mgifford]

How do we postpone this until there is better browser support?