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Comment by ryokeken | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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 a longstanding abbreviation for "accessibility"

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

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.

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