Accessibility Allies Against A11y
One of the things common to all web geekery is the use of the acronym. Everyone has their favourite TLA even if some people will argue about the precise semantic definition of an acronym in the first place.
I don’t really have a problem with the use of acronyms, provided that they are expanded (whether via HTML or in text) on at least their first use in a given page or message. What I do object to however is the assumption that if you use an acronym or abbreviation, other people will understand what you mean, and if not, they can always look it up.
Well, no. If you can’t be bothered to make your message sufficiently clear in the first place, I don’t see why I should bother to dig around trying to figure out what you are trying to say. And sadly, I find that the accessibility community are one of the worst when it comes to this.
The idea of accessibility is to make websites (or other things) more easily usable by people, most frequently specifically “people who are disabled”. This is emphatically not just about using alt tags (note: always call them tags, it annoys the purists). Accessibility is not just about the blind.
If you want to make your sites accessible, you need to consider other impairments: motor impairments — users who can’t use a mouse; hearing impairments; other visual impairments; dyslexia and other cognitive impairments and so on. And he we come to something which is a cross-over between general good practice and accessibility — the ease with which your content can be understood.
Obviously cognitive impairment is not a binary position: it reflects a continuum of impairment. You can understand therefore that if your page is slightly easier to understand, this will tip the balance for some people between being able to use it and not.
And this is where we come to the counter-intuitive a11y abbreviation. It looks like “ally” (and many pronounce it as such), but it means something entirely different. It means “accessibility”. How on earth do you get from “a11y” to “accessibility”, you may well ask. Ahah! Here’s the clever bit (or, in my opinion, the bloody ridiculous bit).
What you do is you look at the number of letters between the first “a” and the final “y”. You’ll find there are 11 of them. So you scoop all of those out and replace them with the number 11. You’ll also see this in i18n and similar. They are the sort of abbreviation which are completely and utterly obscure and opaque to anyone not already “in the know”.
As far as accessibility goes — something which is supposed to promote understanding — the use of a11y is therefore very clearly b6s.
I understand that there is a need sometimes (for example when on twitter) to use an abbreviation, as accessibility is quite a long word. But any abbreviation used should be one from which the word “accessibility” can be reasonably inferred without esoteric knowledge.
One possible suggestion would be to use the abbreviation “access” (6 letters). It’s significantly clearer than “a11y” (4 letters) and significantly shorter than “accessibility” (13 letters). It does have one drawback in that people frequently use “access” (particularly on twitter) to refer to Microsoft Access databases.
So there’s two questions.
- Do you agree that a11y is a poor abbreviation for accessibility, and we ought to use something better?
- What should we use instead (and why)?
My personal belief (after having looked around on twitter) is that #access might clash too much with other things, so a different option may be preferable; but also that #access is preferable to #a11y. But can we come up with something that is better than both of them?
I don’t really think we should be looking at something specifically related to the web, as people might want to use an equivalent tag to mark accessibility in other software (or in a non-IT capacity).
So let’s have your thoughts on the following, and any others you can come up with:
- #a11y
- #access
- #accessibility
- #accessy
- #disability
- #disacc
- #webacc
Seb Crump says:
October 28th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Right with you on this one Jack. I firstly thought it was ally, then assumed it was an event and therefore was merrily ignoring them as I didn’t know what the event was and didn’t think it had relevance to my interests.
I quite like #webacc, but #access is probably clearest. Just need to get enough support and people using it to drive out those priority database types – they could use #msaccess after all
Gary Miller says:
October 28th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
1. I don’t tweet myself, yet, but it certainly seems a bizarre choice of abbreviation. From an outsider’s point of view, I quite like ability as a shortened version of accessibility.
2. You really must stop annoying the standardistas by referring to alt as a tag and not an attribute!
JackP says:
October 28th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Gary, nope, it’s part of my credo. See my ALA article…
Gary Miller says:
October 28th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Very good…now all I have to do is figure which camp I fall into…
Aaron Leventhal says:
October 29th, 2009 at 1:43 am
You’ll get used to it. It’s just programmer’s shorthand, and not necessarily meant as the friendly end-user facing term. It follows l10n (localization) and i18n (internationalization), which both came before. The pattern is first letter + # of letters + last letter.
Basically, it’s a lot easier to type when you have to type it many times each day, which is important for those have have suffered repetitive strain like myself.
JackP says:
October 29th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I am “used to it”; that doesn’t stop me from feeling that it is inherently wrong and those trying to promote accessibility should not use abbreviations which make a barrier to understanding.
It seems to me that this rather misses the point of accessibility, and that those claiming it’s okay if you only use it when you think your audience is other people who already know it are the equivalent of people who say “but blind people don’t use my site”.
You’re putting up an unnecessary barrier. You shouldn’t. End of.
Henny Swan says:
October 29th, 2009 at 11:19 am
What Aaron said.
It’s part of a bigger picture of trimming down long and often written words that are problematic to write over and over again. It should be used only when suitable to context i.e. with others who work in that area and not in general blog posts etc.
It also works for me on Twitter with 140 characters but shouldn’t be used if you can fit the full word in.
I really don’t see it as a big issue. Yes there will be people who don’t know the meaning but like with most things you don’t know about you ask / search for an answer. I do that constantly in my day-to-day work.
Seb Crump says:
October 29th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
@Aaron I think it’s the wrong solution – it’s technically easy to set up auto-correction or other text-expander type software to achieve this. I have no objection to you typing l18n or whatever, I do object to reading it though. It goes against the “don’t make me think” maxim.
I’m with Jack that it o8s u12y and I w3d n4y go so far as to say that it will b3g a3t the end of c12e c11n in c10n!
Gary Miller says:
October 29th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Feet planted in the ‘against’ camp. Fine if it’s used among a group who are savvy to the expanded version, but keep it within specific user/interest groups please.
Just my take on it…
Joe Chidzik says:
October 30th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Though I like the sound of #access, searching twitter for it produces loads of results about MS Access.
#usable obviously already tied to #usability, but isn’t there so much cross over with accessibility they could be used interchangeably? (I’m curious as to what usability peeps would say on this, but I like #usable as a #a11y alternative)
I would say accessibility implies usability – accessibility isn’t just about having keyboard access, but making that keyboard access easy (logical tab order, visible focus etc)
Aaron Leventhal says:
October 30th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
What Henny said. It’s an appropriate abbreviation in certain contexts — e.g. between coders or on Twitter.
I do suggest one more abbrevation, just one I promise!
I think bikeshedding should be b10g
Just a small joke
Bennett McElwee says:
November 1st, 2009 at 10:38 pm
It’s like a cancer. It started with i18n, which made some sense since internationalatorisation is such a long word. But then someone thought that it would be cute if the complementary term “localisation” received the same treatment, even though it doesn’t need it because it’s not that long. Similarly, “accessibility” is not that long and does not need its own special a10n.
But I think it’s OK as a hashtag because it’s idiomatic, and is no more cryptic than half the other hashtags out there.
And it’s not called the alt tag. It’s the alt thingy.
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