Jonathan HoggDo you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
Final note on this: I’m not gonna name and shame the thing I was reading, but maybe if you want to convince me how great an idea is for accessibility on the web, you could try using proper words that I can actually read
Chaos@jonathanhogg love to be able to read stuff and understand it on the first go without needing to look up information.
No wonder agentic coding is so popular...
John T@jonathanhogg I had to look this up, which essentially confirms your point.
Prof. Catherine Flick@jonathanhogg yes! I keep reading it as “ally”
Zoe 
@CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg me too! I’m glad I’m not the only one
gnate@themediumkahuna Oh, does it not? Even knowing it references accessibility, I still assumed it was to be read as "ally."
I hereby declare its use even dumber than I thought.
@CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg
Michelle Hughes@gnate @themediumkahuna @CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg
On the stenotype, it's spelled like "SEBLT" and it's actually super fun to type for some reason, but that might be because I am easily amused.
woe2you@gnate @themediumkahuna @CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg That's the fella who fits a wheelchair ramp and a disco ball to your car.
mirabilos@mirabilos Individually pronouncing each letter is what I imagined. X.S.A.B.L.T.
But then, having an abbreviation that survives translation is a beast of a problem!
hellocatfood@jonathanhogg That and I18n can do one.
Abhijit Menon-Sen@jonathanhogg I agree, if it's not used appropriately, it has approximately zero acceptability.
James@jonathanhogg I wonder what the origin story is?
It feels like something someone wrote in a conference talk to crack a gag about making something over-trendy and unintentionally inaccessible.
And people used it as a joke to each other so much that the funny wore off and it accidentally got adopted.
It feels like something someone wrote in a conference talk to crack a gag about making something over-trendy and unintentionally inaccessible.
And people used it as a joke to each other so much that the funny wore off and it accidentally got adopted.
lpbkdotnet@jtruk @jonathanhogg the general form (a11y, i18n, k8s) has been around a while now.
I think i18n came first, probably because it was easier than repeatedly having the "internationalisation vs internationalization" spelling debate...
But I have seen it said that "k8s" was first because no one could remember how to spell (or pronounce) kubernetes?
Either way, I absolutely hate that this has just become how the tech industry abbreviates things.
It feels like it's on the "smug" side of clever
@lpbkdotnet @jtruk Wikipedia believes that i18n was coined in the 70s and is DEC's fault. Since humans read word-at-a-time by shape, I consider them all to be instances of "I am too lazy to type and therefore you will have to work harder to read"
@jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet None of this excludes 'a11y' being a joke that got out of hand. I think that's a pretty strong candidate here!
Gerardo Lisboa@jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet @jtruk But it helps sometimes: try to go a interoperability meeting and you'll see why saying "i14y" is much more pratical.
Whatever the case, in my texts I always put an abbreviation with the expanded term right in the beginning. If it's seldom used, I only write the expanded form.
Andrew@gvlx @jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet @jtruk I mean sure, "interoperability" is a long word, but isn't "interop" the normal and obviously better abbreviation? Seven letters, easier to say out loud, and perfectly understandable even to lay people?
@andrewt @jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet @jtruk No. That means something else. And in this context is meaningless.
@gvlx @jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet @jtruk ok but doesn't that mean that in this context it's free to be used as an abbreviation for "interoperability"? loads of words mean different things in different contexts, it's almost never a problem
@jonathanhogg @andrewt But that's normal. Every group will develop their own language and conduct, opaque to outsiders.
Just like a group of friends will develop their own stories and contexts.
It's only a bad thing when the discussion is meant to welcome outsiders.
@gvlx @jonathanhogg Most industries develop jargon when they need a word for some highly specific thing that nobody else would ever need or want to refer to. That's not really the same thing as saying "i14y" when you already have "interoperability" and "interop". If your language is that wilfully incomprehensible to outsiders, how do you expect to make new insiders?
@andrewt @jonathanhogg Or just to speed conversation.
@gvlx @jonathanhogg if you want to speed up conversation you should say "interop" because it's one less syllable, and that's setting aside the massive time-save of not having to repeatedly explain what "eye fourteen why" means
@jtruk @jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet I now just pronounce k8s as Kachtes. This is stupid.
Internationalisation and localisation have been around for far longer than this cloud bullshit, but it’s still annoying, as these terms are also often confused with each other.
1a1nC@jonathanhogg I also had to look this up (apart from k8s since my brother works on calico, and it actually sounds vaguely like the actual word). So yeah, and as a system architect - no developers should not be using this shorthand in API's - developers should learn to f&^king spell and express themselves clearly in code/docs/etc or have their work QA'd by people who can 🙂
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)A8y! I c8y a3e!
Aedius Filmania ⚙️🎮🖊️"But it looks like ally, it's great"
Fuck you Jean-Eude. People should not do gatekeeping for something that important.
Panicz Maciej Godek@jonathanhogg someone wrote a brilliant post about that:
Marmly Owl (@[email protected])
A11y is about the least accessible way of writing 'accessibility' possible. A-11-letters-Y is not enough information to go on unless you've already been primed to understand it. It's aesthetically (a11y) ugly, astonishingly (a11y) pretentious, and has just this awful whiff of artificiality (a11y) about it. In an age where machines will automatically (a11y) type entire words out for you using the shorthand is aggravatingly (a11y) lazy and unintuitive. Quite frankly it strains acceptability (a11y). I don't think that this numeronym is being used appropriately (a11y).
Ianto Jones@jonathanhogg never once have I heard "a11y," and I've been doing this nonsense for a long time. I venture that anyone who uses it in a serious way and expects others to understand is a pretentious wanker trying to convince themselves that they're intelligent.
Mad Engineering@jonathanhogg at the very minimum, you'd want to do this before publishing:
sed -e 's/a11y/accessibility/g' mydocument
Yes, i will explain this if anyone doesn't speak Linux.
eclexic@jonathanhogg Wait, why am i just learning of this... who's idea was it to have accessibility abbreviated in a way screen readers won't be able to read?
That is worse than the word lisp. What the actual fuck?
Jayesh Bhoot@jonathanhogg Whoever coined that term must have felt so proud to be an a11y to #accessibility
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦@jonathanhogg @ShaulaEvans absolutely arrogant. Enough with that nonsense, I'm with you 👍 .
Octavia Con Amore 
Succubard's Library
piku 
minor!@jonathanhogg parses as ally
Radomír Žemlička@jonathanhogg Hey, we can spell! 😄 Plus, even then it's pretty dumb in APIs since almost everybody uses some form of auto-complete.
Jeff Atwood@jonathanhogg is it really more arbitrary than any other abbreviation, though? If anything the uniqueness is a long term good, like https:// ended up being
@codinghorror "Accessibility" is not a word that needs abbreviation. "Ah-eleven-why" is longer and harder to say, which is what a screen reader will do. The result is harder to read, since it requires mental translation or manual lookup. It serves only as a shibboleth and a lazy optimisation for those who hate typing and/or spelling. For such people, the correct tools have already been invented: macro expansions and continuous spell checking. My hatred of it is unbounded.
@jonathanhogg I hear you and I could raise you fifty other even more worthy examples but I humbly submit this particular h5e has left the b4n
@jonathanhogg @codinghorror or even a-elf-y-psi-lon…
@jonathanhogg @codinghorror also, this whole count the number of letters is stupid, who knows offhand how long which word is…
@mirabilos @jonathanhogg not saying I'm a fan, just that there are so many battles to pick right now
Tristram Brelstaff@jonathanhogg Surely you mean 'f2k off'?
gudenau@jonathanhogg I have no idea what that means.
@jonathanhogg one good thing I got out of this is learning a new word: numeronym!
(or n7m if you're feeling cute/violent)
(or n7m if you're feeling cute/violent)
Billy O'Neal@jonathanhogg @0xabad1dea I hate numeronyms with the fire of 1000 suns. You too i18n and k8s
Richard JohnsonYou caused me to finally research what that "a11y" was about.
Leetspeak number sub for "ally? No.
"aleventy"? "aelevy"? Any other spoken number variation bookended with an a and y? No.
Finally... wow, counting letters is beyond stupid. It's not even a good counter-example joke. 🤷
I can't see using it under the covers either. Too dumb.
The Turtle@jonathanhogg all my alt text is OYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOYOY