
UK government changes website guidelines due to buggy screen readers - xopher
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2016/07/20/changes-to-the-style-guide-no-more-eg-and-ie-etc/
======
robert_tweed
I think a lot of commenters in this thread are missing an important point
about accessibility. It does not just mean "works with screen readers". It
means easily understood by anyone. A lot of people confuse the terms e.g. and
i.e. so it is normally better to say "For example" or "That is" because these
are natural phrases that will be clearly understood by a greater number of
people.

I try to constantly improve my writing style, where improve normally means
"simplify". I am personally guilty of overusing these abbreviations through
force of habit, but I edit them out when I can. For anywhere with a formal
house style, adopting this seems to make sense, even for things like
scientific papers. Excessive use of jargon is a common accessibility problem
and in most cases, there's no good reason for it other than dogma.

I am also a big fan of the old Borland "no nonsense licence" for similar
reasons. For anyone that hasn't read it, here's a link:

[http://www.osnews.com/story/22342/Borland_in_the_1980s_Treat...](http://www.osnews.com/story/22342/Borland_in_the_1980s_Treat_Software_Just_Like_a_Book_/)

This just illustrates that even something requiring the precision of a legal
document can be written in plain, approachable English. There really is no
excuse.

~~~
Symbiote
Many documents and websites produced by government in the UK have the "Crystal
Mark for Plain English". Details at [1].

I don't notice the difference, but non-natives have occasionally said they've
been surprised when certain information is clear, such as letters from a bank.

[1] [http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-
mark.html](http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html)

~~~
anexprogrammer
You probably would have noticed the difference in the 80s and 90s when banks
and others still wrote in tortuous, horrifically formal, English. Why take two
sentences when a page and a half would do?

Usually the only places you still regularly saw "inst", notwithstanding and
heretofore. If you wanted to understand at first reading being a contract
lawyer helped.

The Plain English Campaign took out most of the low hanging fruit years back.

------
franciscop
I love what UK Gov is doing, they actually sound like the kind of business
that I'd love to work with (I'm totally surprised because it's a Government)
and I'm learning a lot just with these articles.

I'd also love to see other governments to take a similar approach, but that
seems highly unlikely for most countries including Spain (where I am from).

~~~
robin_reala
We’re hiring back-end developers and web-ops currently, maybe you should
apply?

~~~
bigblind
How is this relevant to the conversation?

~~~
hobs
Because they are working on UK Government projects, check the profile :)

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pluma
Aside from the quirky interpreations of "eg" and "ie" that triggered this
decision, the abbreviations "e.g." and "i.e." are actually problematic,
especially when dealing with non-native speakers (or even simply people who
had no exposure to Latin).

"e.g." means "exempli gratia" \-- I am fairly confident the majority of
readers in an international audience (or maybe even a national one) will not
actually know this and come up with their own personal _backronym_ (like
"ergo" or "example given").

"i.e." means "id est" (literally "that is") -- I know for a fact that even
people with some exposure to Latin get this one wrong and instead think it
means something like "in exemplum", which actually leads to people using it
incorrectly when they should actually use "e.g.". I know this is what I did as
a teenager in Germany (while learning Latin in school) and I know that this is
what many of my German colleagues tend to do, simply because it seems like an
obvious equivalent of the German "zum Beispiel" ("for example").

In the context of a website that explicitly tries to use simple English when
possible, I think it is perfectly valid to preempt this confusion and not use
phrases which are not actually English and can trivially be substituted with
unabbreviated English equivalents in prose (whereas even the unabbreviated
Latin would likely not help the reader).

EDIT: I'm not saying you shouldn't use "e.g." or "i.e." ever. I personally use
them all the time. But it's absolutely consistent to avoid them when you're
trying to use simple language to be understood by a broad audience with
varying levels of comprehension.

~~~
waqf
I don't see what knowing these abbreviations has to do with knowing Latin.
They are, to all intents and purposes, English words used in English writing,
and people who have had the opportunity to develop a good English vocabulary
in other respects will have learned these words too.

(Note, I grew up in England. I have begun to suspect that these abbreviations
are used a little less in the US. But there again, if that is the case then
the problem still lies with people's unfamiliarity due to not much usage — or
perhaps with screen readers' unfamiliarity due to US-centric development — not
with Latin.)

(Also, wouldn't the German equivalent of "i.e." be "d.h." which I'm sure I've
seen for "das heißt"?)

~~~
yorwba
You are right about "d.h." being the German equivalent of "i.e." but I've met
a lot of Germans who pronounced it "daher" ("therefore"). I guess that proves
a point about avoiding obscure abbreviations when someone else needs to
understand what you wrote.

------
lmm
> And while ‘e.g.’ gets read correctly by screen readers, there are better,
> clearer ways of introducing examples for all users.

Strongly disagree. "e.g." has its place; it is often clearer than any
alternative. Likewise "i.e.". "eg" is unpleasantly confusing even as an
ordinary reader and should never have been allowed, but to remove "e.g." too
is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

~~~
kitd
Could you explain why it is better than, say, "say"?

(neat, huh?)

~~~
supergreg
They could put the e.g. inside a dfn tag or teach the screen readers how to
read it.

~~~
jscholes
> They could put the e.g. inside a dfn tag or teach the screen readers how to
> read it.

I'm afraid not. AFAIK, screen readers don't apply any special processing for
DFN tags. Speaking as someone who's using a screen reader to read this thread
and proofread this comment, I'm not sure I'd want them to either, and I hadn't
even heard of them until today.

Also, screen readers are able to speak through several, possibly hundreds, of
different speech engines, so you would have to teach each of those engines to
deal with these corner cases separately. Given that many of them were
developed ten plus years ago and are now no longer under active development
despite continued widespread usage, that's not really a realistic goal.

N.B. AFAIK is spoken by my screen reader/speech engine combo as "uh-fake". As
a blind software developer, I have much bigger problems to worry about than
memorising how my software speaks abbreviations. I of course don't speak for
everyone though and clearer communication is always an excellent goal.

------
kennydude
People will use buggy software, and I think some of the things it might say
would be quite amusing:

"If you have committed any crimes egg tax fraud, insurance fraud, theft"

Egg tax fraud anyone?

------
wtbob
Writing 'eg' instead of 'e.g.' or 'ie' instead of 'i.e.' is just dumb, though.
So is confusing the two.

~~~
csours
1\. Not everyone is a fluent English reader. If you are providing government
services, you have to provide them to "dumb" people as well. "Dumb" in this
case includes a lot of smart people who were not raised with English as their
first language.

2\. There is no official version of the English language. Pronunciations,
spellings and style guides change over time.

Disclaimer: This post is subject to Muphry's Law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)

~~~
wtbob
> Not everyone is a fluent English reader.

I.e. & e.g. aren't English, but rather Latin. Any educated person in the
Western world should understand them, no?

------
Flimm
The comments section of the blog post is a perfect example of bike-shedding.

------
marktangotango
A lot of developers aren't familiar with ADA compliance, it could become
something we're (edit all US based developers) all talking about in the near
future.

[http://www.technologylawsource.com/2015/06/articles/informat...](http://www.technologylawsource.com/2015/06/articles/information-
technology/the-focus-of-the-ada-turns-to-websites-in-the-digital-age-is-your-
website-compliant/)

~~~
kminehart
This is only a requirement for government entities and non-profits at the
moment. For those who didn't read the article, in April of 2016 the Department
of Justice, the organization responsible for the Americans with Disabilities
Act, has proposed an amendment, which will "require public entities and public
accommodations that provide products or services to the public through
websites on the Internet to make their sites accessible to and usable by
individuals with disabilities.". Immediately after, the article says that they
were careful not to suggest that currently inaccessible websites are exempt.

So if you have a website currently up and you're providing a product or
service, similar to having a wheelchair accessible entrance, you may be
required to provide a more accessible website, or an accessible alternative.

For those of you who aren't familiar with website accessibility, you might
want to brush up on the ADA guidelines.
[https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm](https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm)

I tend to test run my websites through Lynx to make sure it works fine without
JavaScript, try to navigate with only a keyboard in Chrome and Firefox, and
try it out with a cheap or free screenreader like Chromevox.

------
aaron695
FFS can we stop spending billions on designing around screen readers and
fucking spend billions on good screen readers.

~~~
teamonkey
How does a screen reader translate FFS?

~~~
manarth
Abbreviations on the web can be expanded using the abbr tag:

<abbr title="Fat Finger Syndrome">FFS</abbr>

This also helps reduce ambiguity about the meaning of an acronym, improving
the communication of semantic intent.

That said, it appears that expansion of <abbr> isn't consistently
supported[1].

I suspect most screenreaders would simply say "Eff Eff Ess".

[1] [http://www.powermapper.com/tests/screen-
readers/labelling/ac...](http://www.powermapper.com/tests/screen-
readers/labelling/acronym-abbr-title/)

~~~
jscholes
> I suspect most screenreaders would simply say "Eff Eff Ess".

Correct, thankfully. I don't really see a use case for screen reader-specific
usage of the abr tag. If everybody else has to read "FFS", possibly having to
look it up on Google to know what on earth it is, why wouldn't I also?
Although I suspect that as a sighted user, you can mouse-over some text marked
up with abr and see the expanded form.

------
akavel
Is it actually officially correct to use "eg" instead of "e.g.", and "ie"
instead of "i.e." in English? (UK, US, AU, or whichever else?) Both
[http://dictionary.cambridge.org](http://dictionary.cambridge.org) and
[http://dictionary.com](http://dictionary.com) seem to show only "e.g." and
"i.e." for me?

~~~
cmsd2
The Guardian style guide is the only one of the newspapers for which I could
find an entry on this.

[https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-
guide-e](https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-e)

It recommends dropping the dots. I know we were taught in school to treat them
as abbreviations and therefore include the dots so I'm not sure where this new
fashion comes from.

~~~
wtbob
Maybe that's just the Grauniad codifying their well-known propensity for
typographical error, though.

------
vineus
They could have changed it to their original form: "et cetera", "ergo", "id
est"

~~~
raverbashing
e.g. is not ergo, it's "exempli gratia" (for the sake of example)

~~~
vineus
My mistake, thanks!

------
erlehmann_
Would using the HTML <abbr> element with an appropriate title attribute help
here?

------
aries1980
So no more PM, AM, AD, BC, DIY, ASAP, LOL, Dr, PhD, OBE, KBE either I guess.

------
grahamel
previously submitted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157284)

------
quirkot
i.e., "We've decided it would be easier to make everyone who updates a page on
the GOV.UK website change their language than to make everyone that makes
screen reading software produce a product that reads screens correctly"

~~~
jscholes
> i.e., "We've decided it would be easier to make everyone who updates a page
> on the GOV.UK website change their language than to make everyone that makes
> screen reading software produce a product that reads screens correctly"

See my previous comments in this thread to learn why this is necessary, and
why it's unrealistic to expect screen readers to "just work™". It's a nice
goal, but it won't happen.

