Provide a glossary for specialized terms
One alphabetical list of the terms your content uses, each with a definition beside it. G62 is the glossary technique, and W3C files it as sufficient for three Level AAA rules, one about unusual words, one about abbreviations, and one about pronunciation. On the pronunciation rule it stands alone. For the other two it works alongside the technique that writes the definitions. That makes a glossary the widest-reaching of these for the effort involved, since one list answers three separate rules. One condition catches people out, though. If your glossary holds two definitions for the same term, the glossary by itself is not enough, because a reader has no way to tell which one applies where they are standing.
How we find it in an audit
A reviewer lists the specialized terms the content uses and checks each one against the glossary, which is the easy half. The harder half is reach. Every page carrying those terms needs a route to the glossary, so a glossary linked only from the homepage does not cover the article that needed it. We look for duplicate entries as well, and where a term carries more than one meaning across the site we say so, since that is the case a glossary cannot settle on its own.
How affected users experience it
For readers with cognitive and learning disabilities, and for anybody reading in a second language, an unfamiliar term is where reading stops. A glossary turns that into a detour rather than a dead end. Screen-reader users gain something extra from the pronunciation half, because a term spelled in an unexpected way can be read aloud as nonsense, and a glossary entry is somewhere to say how it actually sounds.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
Each term links to a plain-language glossary entry, and the glossary itself is reachable from the footer of every page.
Fails
Medical results use titer, reference range and ANA, with no definitions anywhere on the site.
Other ways to satisfy this rule
7 guides on this site are filed under 3.1.3 Unusual Words. W3C lists this one as sufficient for that rule only alongside G101, so the pair is what passes and neither half does on its own.
- G55sufficientLink unusual words to their definitions
- G70sufficientOffer a dictionary search for specialized content
- G101sufficientDefine words used in an unusual or restricted way
- G112sufficientDefine specialized terms inline where they appear
- H40sufficientMark up term-and-definition pairs as description lists
- H54sufficientMark the defining instance of a term with dfn
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique G62: Providing a glossary. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.