Acronyms against accessibility
For my fellow word nerds out there: I will be using the word acronym throughout this article as a catch-all expression to refer to acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations. I’m sure you’ll agree that, as a title, ‘Acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations against accessibility’ is a lot less catchy.
Have you ever been to a business meeting where there was a slide presentation full of acronyms?
CMS, BAU, CR, TBD, ROI, OKR, OKI, USP, COP, EOD, AWOL, Rep, PP, RRP, Cons, PTC, RAG, SEM, SAL, TAP, Min, ABM, DMP, CTR, FCR…
This might be a non-issue for you if you have been in that business for a long time. Or if you have the ability to retain what these acronyms mean. Or if you have a very helpful manager or colleague who tells you what everything means as the meeting goes on.
However, what if you have recently joined the business? What if you process information in such a way that a bunch of letters doesn’t make sense to you? What if the meeting is happening in your second, third or fourth language?
What happens in those cases is that you are likely to feel excluded. And you are likely to miss out on important information.
What does that have to do with accessibility?
I am a writer. More precisely: a content designer. This means I try to make content accessible, easy to understand and simple enough that anyone knows what I’m talking about. The Content Design framework is a set of guidelines and principles that help with providing information in a timely and helpful way. One of the key principles of this framework is to avoid things that make information difficult to understand. Things like long sentences, jargon words, symbols and, you guessed it, acronyms.
As humans, we need additional processing power from our brain to understand acronyms. And for some of us, the effort needed is greater due to some of the reasons mentioned above: neurodiversity, multilingualism or simply being new to a business.
So acronyms make content less accessible. This means that not everyone can follow and benefit from that content. Not everyone can build on it, ask questions about it or work with it.
What can you do?
The Content Design guideline about acronyms is this:
Abbreviations and acronyms are generally not good for readability. If the short form is better known it may be OK. But it’s dangerous to assume something is familiar. Test your content.
Source: Readability Guidelines — Abbreviations and acronyms
An example of when a short form is better is USB. This initialism is certainly easier than the full word: Universal Serial Bus.
The final part of the guideline asks you to “test your content”. If you are creating content for users, this is or should be a very important part of your work. If you are creating a presentation for internal purposes, testing your content isn’t the way to go. But you can put yourself in another person’s shoes: a brand new colleague, a colleague whose native language is different to yours, someone with a different way of processing information.
The exact same principle applies when you voice over your presentation: only use acronyms if they are better than the full word.
In summary, what you can do is only use acronyms when they are actually helpful.
You will be making your content more accessible. And a lot of people will thank you for it.
