Do 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
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@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
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@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.
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@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 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.
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@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
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@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"
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@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.
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@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?
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@andrewt @jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet @jtruk No. That means something else. And in this context is meaningless.
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