Whenever I read a piece like this or another UX blog, it just becomes so obvious how little we care about a11y.
“Good” (as in accessible) design is pretty boring and decluttered compared to most modern expectations of web apps. I read Adam Silver’s book on forms and came away realizing that we’re doing it entirely wrong from an a11y standpoint but that’s just not a priority.
Numerical ones don’t seem to exist outside of IT, but other fields do the same strategy of abbreviating common long words by keeping only a letter or two. The non-numerical way is to just replace the rest with an “x” like “txn” for “transaction” in finance or “pax” for “passengers” in transportation or “sx” for “symptoms” in medicine.
> Is it still okay to make "nothing sucks like a VAX" jokes?
Please!
I was a stage II CS student learning assembly programming on a VAX simulator. Wrote a VAX simulator, in VAX assembly then ran VAX assembly programmes on it.
I claim your time would be better spent figuring out why it makes you unhappy and working out how to not mind it - this is a somewhat common means of abbreviation, and you'll probably encounter it again.
It's a longstanding abbreviation for "accessibility", along the same lines of i18n being an abbreviation for internationalisation. There's the first letter, and the last letter, and between them a count of the number of letters elidded.
It's really uncommon to see, I wouldn't call it "long-standing" at all. It's really obscure jargon that even most technical people don't know. At least "i18n" is widespread enough that most people will see it, though that's stupid too because it's incredibly unclear. I had no idea what it meant until this year despite having seen it for a decade or more.
The word you're looking for is "jargon". It refers to niche-specific words that are hard for outsiders to understand, and isn't just tech-specific. "Lingo" is a much broader term.
True. I was grasping at straws for the right word. Thank you.
The Greek/Latin/<jargon> structure should be standard or taught in schools in some capacity.
Basic programming concepts are popular, useful and should probably be taught as a sub category of English... given that programming is supposed to be a language, and pull its roots (somewhat) from English or "natural language".
Society would produce higher quality code if the basic concepts were considered as a literacy requirement for children.
It's a word that starts with a, then 11 letters, then ends in y. The format is not hard to grok once you understand it then context and sheer elimination leaves only a few choices
edit: I will say this is a bad example because looking it up there is 40+ words that fit this description so maybe I am biased by experience. i18n works better but I think my point is no longer correct.
I would hope (read: pray) that on HN a11y isn't jargon. On a thread about scrollbars (i.e., UI and UX) a11y should be as accessible as saying UI or UX.
Again, obscure and jargon are a function of context.
Spitballing...Keep in mind, without context, "accessibility" is also jargon in the sense not everyone is going to know what and how that means. My mum certainly wouldn't understand a11y, I agree. But she also would understand "accessibility" or even "website accessibility."
Full disclosure: I'm 5x more picky than the next person when it comes to comms. Absolutely, words matter. But one of the foundations to comms is context. The context in this case is HN.
It’s not exactly wrong from a business standpoint. The math just comes out that a business does better when they do all the things they can’t do if they want an accessible website. Dark patterns, especially, are very anti-accessibility.
Laws to mandate accessibility, laws to mandate provable correctness, laws to mandate fairness, and laws to break up the big, for only the big could satisfy all the other laws.
No reference I know of. I'm just struggling to balance on the one hand each field's demand to be taken seriously (and since the public doesn't take them seriously, experts appeal to legislators for validation), and on the other hand the Brandeisian push against Bigness that arises after decades of regulatory capture.
I have no stake in a11y, but I hear the same appeal re software correctness and statistical significance and many other individually reasonable asks, that nevertheless add up to a gridlock of regulations.
“Good” (as in accessible) design is pretty boring and decluttered compared to most modern expectations of web apps. I read Adam Silver’s book on forms and came away realizing that we’re doing it entirely wrong from an a11y standpoint but that’s just not a priority.