WTF OMG its Dictionary Maintenance

It’s easy to ignore the thousands of decisions that go into a piece of software or a website.  Beyond what each page says and how it’s arrange, there how many menu items and how they’re organized to the size of a font and the degree of contrast from the background.  These are things that most people never think about, but encounter virtually every day.  

Noah Sussman wrote a post called Falsehoods programmers believe about time . It illustrates all of the various ways a programmer can screw up coding time in an application.   For example:

• There are always 24 hours in a day.
• Months have either 30 or 31 days.
• Years have 365 days.
• February is always 28 days long.
• Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).

In it he gives a hat tip to Patrick McKenzie’s Falsehoods programmers believe about names which gives a litany of ways to incorrectly program names. 

I am reminded of these as I manage a system dictionary which serves as the spell check for the application.   When you search for “dictionary maintenance” you get a full page of definitions of maintenance (with the last being the Urban Dictionary definition of “high maintenance”), but there no resources that I could find which aid in maintaining a system dictionary. 

The reason for this is that the dictionary is, well, the dictionary. It’s given to us and there’s one way right way to write a word, right?  

Aside from the obvious misspellings and slag which people frequently recommend be added to the dictionary, there are a host of other issues you encounter when you dive into the maintenance aspect of adding or rejecting items for the dictionary.

Names in general pose a variety of issues.  Should proper nouns / proper names be in the dictionary?   The editors as Wikipedia wish to make a distinction between the two,

A distinction is normally made in current linguistics between proper nouns and proper names. By this strict distinction, because the term noun is used for a class of single words (tree, beauty), only single-word proper names are proper nouns: Peter and Africa are both proper names and proper nouns; but Peter the Great and South Africa, while they are proper names, are not proper nouns

For my purposes they’re largely interchangeable.   Individuals’ names do not need to be included in the dictionary while business names (especially those which are unique or spelled incorrectly al la Dunkin Donuts) should be included in the dictionary.  Location and geographic names such as towns, cities, counties, states, lakes, rivers etc. should be included in the dictionary.  

Initialisms and Acronyms are always fun.   While extremely similar there are slight differences.

Initialisms are abbreviations which consist of the initial (i.e. first) letters of words and which are pronounced as separate letters when they are spoken”- Oxford Dictionaries

For example the BBC (British Broadcasting Company), UN (United Nations) and the text lingo WTF (What the Fuck) and OMG (Oh My God).  On the other hand,

Acronyms are words formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as they are spelled, not as separate letters.- Oxford Dictionaries

These are things such FIAT, IKEA and SCUBA.  (Some might also call these neologisms as they’ve become words inthemselves and most couldn’t tell you what they stand for with the possible exception of SCUBA).

Another issue with names is shortening them.   While most Europeans wouldn't dream of shortening Katherine to Kathy without explicit permission, in America we frequently do just that. Rather than putting in the full name of a company, its shortened because it’s familiar.  For example, L.L. Bean shortened to Bean’s /Beans (L.L.Bean also falls into the category Names with Punctuation).

Abbreviations: Similar to acronyms, abbreviations are short hand for longer words.  So rather than writing out the full word such as “evaluation” the user writes “eval”.  Client become clt. (or pt.). Many words may have multiple versions of an abbreviation such as appointment.  Would you abbreviate it as appt?  apt? If you schedule multiple, is it  appts? What if they live in an apartment (apt.)?

There’s also names with punctuation which adds a twist.  I always ensure that a business which uses punctuation has it correctly in the dictionary, but this doesn’t prevent people from recommending variations (especially names that seem like they should have hyphens such as Walmart/ Wal-Mart).  Other names with punctuation include, O*Net, Asperger’s /Asperger syndrome (both seem to be acceptable) and L.L. Bean.  

Lastly, you have those which hit the jackpot of issues: Lou Gehrig’s disease (proper name and punctuation) or should that be ALS (initialisms) or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis?


Photo courtesy of Perosha

TED Tuesday: Neil Harbisson Sees Infrared and Ultraviolet

In this fascinating talk Neil Harbisson talks about using a device which converts color to sound.  He's funny and engaging and presents an amazing perspective of the world as someone who has never seen color but hears it, and how it's impacted his perspective of fashion, created connections between individuals and interpreted music.



Full transcript and downloads available from TED

Creating Accessible Links for the Web and Documents

The web has allowed us to quickly point people to a piece of information, news article, website or profile through the use of hyperlinks.   Word documents which are intended foremost to be printed, but also distributed electronically, links can pose accessibility problems because in print you'd want links to look one way and electronically another. However there is a way to meet both needs. 

On the web, you hide where the link goes behind the text which tells you what the link is. For example, instead of putting in the full web address of a site such as http://boingboing.net/,  you'd tell the reader where the link goes such as  Boing Boing. When someone visits a website, we know that people are viewing it electronically and there's no assumption that it'll be printed so there's no reason to display links outright.  If someone wants to follow the link, they click it.  

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) state specify that for accessibility reasons this is how it should be done:

2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context): The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context, except where the purpose of the link would be ambiguous to users in general. (Level A)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization which issues the WCAG,  explains (my emphasis):

The intent of this Success Criterion is to help users understand the purpose of each link so they can decide whether they want to follow the link. Whenever possible, provide link text that identifies the purpose of the link without needing additional context. Assistive technology has the ability to provide users with a list of links that are on the Web page. Link text that is as meaningful as possible will aid users who want to choose from this list of links. Meaningful link text also helps those who wish to tab from link to link.

In a nutshell, when a user is using a screen reader, which converts text to speech,  they can move from link to link in a document or on a webpage.   When these user do this, they are presented with a meaningful list of link locations rather an the full url or web address of the links. 

If you're preparing a document for print, hiding where the link goes means the reader won't know what the web address is for that site, much less follow it.   We know that people will be viewing it in printed form so we need to display the link so they can use it later and type it into their browser.  If that same document is on your website or given to participants electronically it needs to be formatted so that people using assistive technology can  hear meaningful information about the link rather than the web address.   So rather than simply hiding the link or displaying the link, use both, and make the entire thing a single long hyperlink.  For example if I was doing a presentation on the Job Accommodation Network's (JAN) Searchable on line Resource (SOAR), in the documents I would list it as:

The Job Accommodation Network's Searchable Online Resource (SOAR) http://askjan.org/soar/

It means that individuals who use screen readers to read the document electronically get the benefit of having meaningful information read to them, and those who print the document get the benefit of seeing what the target of the link it, the actual web address or url.  If you wish, you can make it visually appear like the rest of the text in the document by changing the styling of hyperlinks so that they don't appear blue and underlined which can sometimes interfere with reading web addresses in print documents (especially if they have underscores "_" in them).

Again, this applies only to documents such as Word documents, Adobe Pdf documents, and PowerPoint.  This strategy should not be applied on webpages themselves where only the meaingful text should be displayed.

It's a small example of how a simple fix can make the document more accessible and more usable to all of your users.  



This is the first part in a series discussing the accessibility issues of electronic documents originally prepared for print audiences.