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I worked at a large financial news site for a number of years. In that time they spent a lot of engineering time to make the site accessible (you can see the ty

I worked at a large financial news site for a number of years. In that time they spent a lot of engineering time to make the site accessible (you can see the types of the problems that crop up here: https://twitter.com/financialtimes/status/1489637761598566402?lang=en-GB https://twitter.com/financialtimes/status/148963776159856640...) However I didn't know we had a team doing that. why? because they called themselves "a11y". I thought it was an analytics team, or and inside joke name. I would see a11y requests, commits and infra changes, but I didn't twig what it was for. I had seen the team lead talk about accessibility in meetings, and I knew that it was very close to their heart, they'd even given conference talks about it. It was only when the team lead changed roles, and I had a catchup with them and asked them what the team name meant. They looked at me and said "its like i8n, you know what that is, you fiddle with it all the time" When I looked blank they said: "you know changing locales and stuff" you mean in Internationalization? Then the penny dropped. a11y == accessibility. the irony of having the least accessible name, for improving accessibility.

neltnerb 5y ago
And a screen reader would have no idea how to parse it without a special case... I've seen stuff tagged with this a lot and every so often someone mentions this issue and I've yet to find an explanation other than if you already know about it it's easier to search for. I appreciate the advice nonetheless but it's just such an odd choice for making it discoverable.
- ChadNauseam 5y ago
  Why would a screen reader have any more trouble with it than someone reading it normally? I usually read it as "ay-one-one-why" or "ally", is that how a screen reader would interpret it?
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    Right, it would read it as "ay-one-one-why". And if you're trying to dictate it, you'd have to say "ay-one-one-why". I don't want to distract from the main point, which is that you should make your websites accessible and that doing so mostly involves not letting some UI designer use a cool trick that lets them do some cute effect that has the side effect of breaking the experience when using accessibility tools. Because they're usually written by people without a need for accessibility tools they don't even notice what they're doing. This is extremely important educational work. And 'a11y' is less horizontal width, so someone who needs to zoom in really far to read text would probably appreciate it, or someone who can still type but doesn't do dictation has to hit fewer keys. But what other situation does it help with? It's jargon, You have to just kind of know that there are 11 characters between the 'a' and the 'y' in accessibility? If the goal is to educate people who don't need accessibility tools themselves it should not be a challenge for people who aren't in the know to find the information. I appreciate the effort and recognize that it caught on. I just don't get why, it seems like it is throwing a needless barrier in the way of the target audience finding the resources. I still try to follow the ideas presented, I just don't understand making it require jargon to find.
    - tarboreus 4y ago
      I use a screen reader and it says "A eleven Y." (As in the letters being said out loud.) It's really not confusing.
thewebcount 5y ago
Thank you for saying this! I see stuff like this a lot here on HN and I almost never know what it means. A16z? Fuck if I know what that is. It reminds me of the terrible sports video game naming - NBA2k22. I get Y2K was fewer characters than fully typing out "year 2000," so it kind of made sense. But 2k22 is the same number of characters as "2022". What is being saved here? It just creates confusion without adding anything useful.
- corndoge 5y ago
  It's called 2k in common parlance now, doesn't make sense from a branding perspective to change it
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  2K Games is the publisher.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  I'm so bloody glad I'm not the only one!
199X 5y ago
Something similar happens nowadays in Spanish, where people use an X as a gender-neutral suffix. Ruining the experience for the visually impaired users that use screen readers. The irony of being 'inclusive' with the non-binary while being exclusive with the visually impaired
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  How much of that is non-Spanish speaking Americans imposing American ideas on the world?
- jhgb 4y ago
  > in Spanish, where people use an X as a gender-neutral suffix I very strongly doubt that this is "happening nowadays" since people speaking a language generally don't switch to using unpronouncable words in their daily affairs.
extra88 5y ago
It's good advice for any abbreviation to define or provide the expanded form the first time it's used; The A11y Project does this in the top heading on its home page, "a11y stands for accessibility." It might be helpful for the project to include that explanation on every page, even if it's just in the footer. "a11y" is useful as a hashtag, is shorter and easier to spell. A11y is a good search term; content containing "a11y" will be about digital accessibility. Content containing "accessibility" could be about DNS issues, account authorization, or a number of other topics even before search "helpfully" expands the search to include "accessible," "access," and other terms.
Vinnl 4y ago
To some extent it's just a name, and it's used across the industry. Similarly, "accessibility" doesn't scream "allow people with disabilities to use your product as well" - at some point, you just have to assume people either know what something means, or will figure it out as they go. (In fact, "a11y" might even be better in that regard, in that it's clearly not a regular word, and thus might cause you to wonder what it means, whereas "accessibility" might lead you to make incorrect assumptions about what they're doing.)

neltnerb 5y ago

And a screen reader would have no idea how to parse it without a special case... I've seen stuff tagged with this a lot and every so often someone mentions this issue and I've yet to find an explanation other than if you already know about it it's easier to search for. I appreciate the advice nonetheless but it's just such an odd choice for making it discoverable.

ChadNauseam 5y ago
Why would a screen reader have any more trouble with it than someone reading it normally? I usually read it as "ay-one-one-why" or "ally", is that how a screen reader would interpret it?
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Right, it would read it as "ay-one-one-why". And if you're trying to dictate it, you'd have to say "ay-one-one-why". I don't want to distract from the main point, which is that you should make your websites accessible and that doing so mostly involves not letting some UI designer use a cool trick that lets them do some cute effect that has the side effect of breaking the experience when using accessibility tools. Because they're usually written by people without a need for accessibility tools they don't even notice what they're doing. This is extremely important educational work. And 'a11y' is less horizontal width, so someone who needs to zoom in really far to read text would probably appreciate it, or someone who can still type but doesn't do dictation has to hit fewer keys. But what other situation does it help with? It's jargon, You have to just kind of know that there are 11 characters between the 'a' and the 'y' in accessibility? If the goal is to educate people who don't need accessibility tools themselves it should not be a challenge for people who aren't in the know to find the information. I appreciate the effort and recognize that it caught on. I just don't get why, it seems like it is throwing a needless barrier in the way of the target audience finding the resources. I still try to follow the ideas presented, I just don't understand making it require jargon to find.
  - tarboreus 4y ago
    I use a screen reader and it says "A eleven Y." (As in the letters being said out loud.) It's really not confusing.

thewebcount 5y ago

Thank you for saying this! I see stuff like this a lot here on HN and I almost never know what it means. A16z? Fuck if I know what that is. It reminds me of the terrible sports video game naming - NBA2k22. I get Y2K was fewer characters than fully typing out "year 2000," so it kind of made sense. But 2k22 is the same number of characters as "2022". What is being saved here? It just creates confusion without adding anything useful.

corndoge 5y ago
It's called 2k in common parlance now, doesn't make sense from a branding perspective to change it
noisem4ker 5y ago
2K Games is the publisher.
KaiserPro 5y ago
I'm so bloody glad I'm not the only one!

199X 5y ago

Something similar happens nowadays in Spanish, where people use an X as a gender-neutral suffix. Ruining the experience for the visually impaired users that use screen readers. The irony of being 'inclusive' with the non-binary while being exclusive with the visually impaired

gherkinnn 5y ago
How much of that is non-Spanish speaking Americans imposing American ideas on the world?
jhgb 4y ago
> in Spanish, where people use an X as a gender-neutral suffix I very strongly doubt that this is "happening nowadays" since people speaking a language generally don't switch to using unpronouncable words in their daily affairs.

extra88 5y ago

It's good advice for any abbreviation to define or provide the expanded form the first time it's used; The A11y Project does this in the top heading on its home page, "a11y stands for accessibility." It might be helpful for the project to include that explanation on every page, even if it's just in the footer. "a11y" is useful as a hashtag, is shorter and easier to spell. A11y is a good search term; content containing "a11y" will be about digital accessibility. Content containing "accessibility" could be about DNS issues, account authorization, or a number of other topics even before search "helpfully" expands the search to include "accessible," "access," and other terms.

Vinnl 4y ago

To some extent it's just a name, and it's used across the industry. Similarly, "accessibility" doesn't scream "allow people with disabilities to use your product as well" - at some point, you just have to assume people either know what something means, or will figure it out as they go. (In fact, "a11y" might even be better in that regard, in that it's clearly not a regular word, and thus might cause you to wonder what it means, whereas "accessibility" might lead you to make incorrect assumptions about what they're doing.)