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Comment by landr0id | Hacker News Reader

> a11y

I apologize for this being so besides the point of your post, but I hate this trend so much.

Hypocritically 'a11y' isn't very accessible for those of us who don't use the jargon.

Also, the first thing the project website (https://www.a11yproject.com) has to do is explain what the '11' stands for. So they must have some awareness of how inaccessible their name is.

It has to be going on at least a decade right? Is it really a trend?

i18n has been around for ever and makes sense since in code it’s a bit long. Then k8s, which never made sense to me. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to call it a trend, but I’ve seen people doing it more frequently.

The irony with this example is people with screen readers will hear something like “aEleveny” and it looks like “ally”.

People with screen readers are aware of acronyms even if they have poor vision, and it's unclear to me what the problem is, a11y has been around forever and in code it's a bit long.

Reading again, is the trend you detest...abbreviations that have a number representing letter count? Based on the existence of k8s and a11y?

I’m just stating my opinion that I find these abbreviations annoying, yes. They are so unintuitive that unless someone explicitly calls out what it’s abbreviating, you probably wouldn’t pick up on it (e.g. the MDN page for Accessibility) and just leaves people confused (like me!). I suspect there’s a reason AccessKit isn’t named `a11yKit`

Aren't a lot of abbreviations unintuitive until you learn what they mean?

Didn't we just have a thread the other day about the meaning of "MDN" - which also many people didn't know.

I see on this site "IMO" "FWIW" "IANAL" "TLDR" all the time. You generally can't tell what these mean either without looking them up or just knowing already because of them being so engrained in culture.

No it’s not the same, a11y creates a dissonance in the mind because part if it wants to see it as “ally”, the other part wants to see it as “A eleven Y” and the other part cringes and thinks its stupid.

If you can't tell a 1 apart from an L...

Thats not the point, but what about people that have vision impairments? Isnt the whole point about accessibility?

Yes it’s awful, “A eleven Y” or is it “A one one Y” Is stupid, inaccessible and the people who use it and came up with it should feel bad.

a11y is similar to Andreessen Horowitz => a16z in that there’s exactly 16 letters in between the first letter and the last.

Seems like good acronym semantics no?

That's not what semantics or acronym mean, this is more of an inside joke, which isn't great.

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