Opening Hours Written in Shorthand

Hours that only regulars can read

A hardware store's website shows its hours in the footer of every page, written the way they appear on the door: M-F 7:30-6, Sa 8-5, Su/hol 10-4.

Regulars read it at a glance. A contractor who stops in every week knows what each letter and number means.

Other visitors work harder. Someone listening through a screen reader hears the letters and symbols read out one by one, and someone reading English as a second language finds Sa and hol in no dictionary.

The store gains nothing from the shorthand. It saves a few characters on a page with plenty of room.

What a screen reader makes of it

Screen readers turn a page's text into speech, for visitors who cannot see the screen or read it easily. They handle words and numbers well, and letters, dashes and slashes much less predictably.

Depending on the program and its settings, M-F may come out as two letters with the word dash between them, and a hyphen between times may be read as minus or skipped.

Sa may be pronounced as a syllable. The slash in Su/hol is often read as the word slash, and hol may be sounded out as a word that does not exist.

A listener can usually work it out, but only by replaying the line, at the moment they wanted a quick answer.

Readers of English as a second language

Shorthand assumes the reader knows local conventions. A visitor still learning English, or visiting from elsewhere, may know Saturday and still not recognise Sa, and few would guess hol.

Translation tools in browsers often leave abbreviations untouched, because they are not words. The full words translate; the shorthand tends to stay as it was.

Times without am or pm add another guess. A regular knows 6 means evening, but 10-4 could be read either way by someone who has never been in.

Writing hours that read well

A few habits cover nearly every case:

• Days in full, such as Monday to Friday, rather than letters.
• Times with am and pm, or the 24-hour clock used consistently.
• The word to between days and times, instead of a dash.
• Noon and midnight in words, since 12 alone is ambiguous.
• Holidays named or dated, instead of hol or stat.
• Closed days stated, so a missing day is not left to guess.

The result is a line or two longer, and every visitor reads it the same way, aloud or on screen.

A short list reads better

Set the hours as a short list rather than one line: Monday to Friday, 7:30 am to 6 pm; Saturday, 8 am to 5 pm; Sunday and holidays, 10 am to 4 pm.

Marked up as a real list, each group sits on its own line, and a screen reader announces the list and how many items it holds, so the listener knows how much is coming.

Sighted visitors scan it faster too, and on a phone a list wraps cleanly where a long line of shorthand breaks in odd places.

Which holidays

Holidays are where shorthand fails most. Hol and stat assume the reader knows which days count, and the list of statutory holidays differs from province to province.

Name the holidays the hours apply to, and in December give each change by date: Thursday, December 25 and Friday, December 26, closed.

Someone planning a trip on a holiday Monday wants a plain yes or no, not a puzzle.

A worked example

An office supply store on the main street of a small Interior city sells paper, ink, furniture and printing to small offices, with a delivery van for business accounts.

Its footer read M-F 8-6, Sa 9-5, Su and stat hol closed. Each December, a banner image on the home page added the holiday hours in the same shorthand.

A longtime customer listening to the site with a screen reader called to ask what the footer meant, and added that the banner said nothing at all: it was an image with no text behind it.

The footer now lists the hours in full, one group of days per line. Holiday hours are text on the home page, each date with its weekday: Wednesday, December 24, 8 am to 3 pm.

The same wording goes into the email to business accounts and the store's Facebook post, so every version of the hours says the same thing in the same words.

Read aloud, each line now comes out as ordinary words and times, so the customer who called hears the same hours everyone else reads.

Hours in images and PDFs

Hours set in an image, such as a holiday banner or a photo of the door sign, are silent to a screen reader unless the image has a text alternative, and hard to read on a phone.

Search engines cannot read them reliably either. Put the hours in text on the page, and let any image repeat them as decoration.

A PDF flyer of holiday hours has the same problem in another form. If the hours matter, they belong on the page itself.

Where else shorthand creeps in

Hours are the common case, not the only one. Product pages say 12/pk and w/ stand; service pages say appt req'd; event pages promise details TBA.

Contact pages abbreviate street types and directions, and team pages abbreviate job titles. Each saves a few letters and costs some readers the meaning.

Read the site once looking only for abbreviations. Most can be written out in full with no loss of space that matters.

The counter-case

Some places really are short of space: a sign on the door, a business card, a tweet of 140 characters. Shorthand there is a fair trade.

Search engines also read hours in a compact coded format inside a page's markup, which visitors never see. That shorthand is for machines and does no harm.

But a web page has room for full words. The visible hours should read the same to a regular, a newcomer and a screen reader.

Rewriting the hours

1. Find every place the hours appear on the site.
2. Write days in full and times with am and pm.
3. Use the word to instead of dashes.
4. Set each group of days on its own line.
5. Name or date the holidays the hours apply to.
6. Replace images of hours with text.
7. Listen to the page with a screen reader once.

Step one matters because hours drift apart. The footer, the contact page and last year's holiday banner often disagree, and a visitor cannot tell which one is current.

Abbreviations of another kind, the designations after names on a team page, are covered in letters after a name that clients cannot decode.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.