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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

I find it ironic that in order for your comment to be accessible the reader must lookup “a11y” to find that it means “accessibility”.

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Relatedly, "i18n" is hard for non-native speakers to understand too, how ironically apt.

It's hard for native speakers too. Numerical contractions aren't part of normal English (i.e they don't seem to exist outside of IT).

Numerical ones don’t seem to exist outside of IT, but other fields do the same strategy of abbreviating common long words by keeping only a letter or two. The non-numerical way is to just replace the rest with an “x” like “txn” for “transaction” in finance or “pax” for “passengers” in transportation or “sx” for “symptoms” in medicine.

Neat, that's one mystery solved. I have seen "x" used like that, but didn't know how it worked.

native speaker of assembly language?

I have dreamt in VAX assembly

Is it still okay to make "nothing sucks like a VAX" jokes?

(I kid, I think VMS has a better design than Linux)

> Is it still okay to make "nothing sucks like a VAX" jokes?

Please!

I was a stage II CS student learning assembly programming on a VAX simulator. Wrote a VAX simulator, in VAX assembly then ran VAX assembly programmes on it.

Was a lot of fun. The dreams were weird tho

First time hearing the term a11y for me too. I hope to never come across it again.

Wait till you hear about k8s and o11y.

I had to Google what o11y meant... :-(

I'm refusing to.

I claim your time would be better spent figuring out why it makes you unhappy and working out how to not mind it - this is a somewhat common means of abbreviation, and you'll probably encounter it again.

I have not seen it in the thirty five years since I learnt what FAQ meant

It's interesting to me how almost nobody uses the `<first letter><number of letters><last letter>` (i18n, a11y, etc) convention anymore.

I guess ubiquitous autocomplete has made that convention redundant.

i18n, s13y, a11y, o11y, k8s...

Well it was never a convention. just an in-group behavior in some incredibly small niches.

It was always a terrible habit.

A problem with the shortening is that, depending on the font, it looks like a four-letter word: a homonym with two meanings.

This is so funny because I read the parent post, looked up "a11y", and then read your response. Had a pretty good laugh.

And educate himself just a tiny little bit? ;)

Then in his next web project, he just might use https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y and make the world a better place!

The new OS M6t W5s 12. Now more accesible. With O5k 365 and M6t E2e. /s

duuuuuude for real a11y? what kind of weird lingo flex is that?

It's a word that starts with a, then 11 letters, then ends in y. The format is not hard to grok once you understand it then context and sheer elimination leaves only a few choices

edit: I will say this is a bad example because looking it up there is 40+ words that fit this description so maybe I am biased by experience. i18n works better but I think my point is no longer correct.

It's a longstanding abbreviation for "accessibility", along the same lines of i18n being an abbreviation for internationalisation. There's the first letter, and the last letter, and between them a count of the number of letters elidded.

Yeah English needs another vocab grouping.

Greek, Latin and <tech lingo>.

The word you're looking for is "jargon". It refers to niche-specific words that are hard for outsiders to understand, and isn't just tech-specific. "Lingo" is a much broader term.

True. I was grasping at straws for the right word. Thank you.

The Greek/Latin/<jargon> structure should be standard or taught in schools in some capacity.

Basic programming concepts are popular, useful and should probably be taught as a sub category of English... given that programming is supposed to be a language, and pull its roots (somewhat) from English or "natural language".

Society would produce higher quality code if the basic concepts were considered as a literacy requirement for children.

It's really uncommon to see, I wouldn't call it "long-standing" at all. It's really obscure jargon that even most technical people don't know. At least "i18n" is widespread enough that most people will see it, though that's stupid too because it's incredibly unclear. I had no idea what it meant until this year despite having seen it for a decade or more.

> It's a longstanding abbreviation for "accessibility"

It's certainly not widespread. Or at least, this is the first time I've ever seen it.

I would hope (read: pray) that on HN a11y isn't jargon. On a thread about scrollbars (i.e., UI and UX) a11y should be as accessible as saying UI or UX.

It's absolutely obscure jargon. One should never use "a11y", just say "accessibility".

And I just can't make my brain not read that as "ally".

Again, obscure and jargon are a function of context.

Spitballing...Keep in mind, without context, "accessibility" is also jargon in the sense not everyone is going to know what and how that means. My mum certainly wouldn't understand a11y, I agree. But she also would understand "accessibility" or even "website accessibility."

Full disclosure: I'm 5x more picky than the next person when it comes to comms. Absolutely, words matter. But one of the foundations to comms is context. The context in this case is HN.

Let's move on now.

That's like saying you shouldn't use slang because people have to look it up.

When speaking to diverse stakeholders I will not use acronyms, slang, colloquialism, or jargon because I want to be accessible.

"Stakeholder" is jargon.

It’s far more literal than others, re people having a stake in something.

Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

(Now just wait for that to pop into your head at the next work meeting)

Whenever I hear ‘stakeholder’ I assume someone is about to be stabbed through the heart. I've never been wrong.

Ok good to know

username checks out.

Jargon to another social circle doesn't help you or your audience.

there's that yes, also, but it's not what he wrote and it's not like it

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