We use several abbreviations on Find postgraduate teacher training (Find) which we should explain properly to users.
Users may need to research the meanings of abbreviations like ‘ITT’, ‘PGCE’, and ‘QTS’, which could mean they lose their position on the page. Users will then need to find their place again, which could cause confusion and be difficult.
What we changed
We have:
- updated the course results page
- updated the course description page
Course results page
We have updated the abbreviations used in each course’s qualification section to use the HTML abbreviation tag. This change allows us to describe the abbreviations for assistive technologies and maintain usability for sighted users.
We did not expand the abbreviations for sighted users as users need to be able to scan and compare courses quickly. Users can hover over the abbreviation to see the meaning.
Course description page
We have expanded the abbreviations PGCE, PGDE, and QTS used at the top of the course description page, which we used to describe the qualifications.
There is enough space to expand the abbreviations, which helps describe content displayed elsewhere on the page - the course details list and the course summary written by providers.
We have not expanded well-known abbreviations, for example, ‘GCSE’, which we believe 80% of the UK population will understand and commonly use.
Further considerations
Provider content
We have not expanded abbreviations or automatically applied an abbreviation tag to the content written by providers. This is something we could consider doing in the future. We will mitigate this problem by offering editorial guidance to the providers.
Filters
We have not expanded or marked up abbreviations in the course results page filters. This is because we do not have enough space and do not want to combine hover and click interactions. We will reassess our approach in the future to ensure it meets our users’ needs.
Screenshots#
Course results#
Course description#
