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.
(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.)
"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.
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.
I appreciate the advice nonetheless but it's just such an odd choice for making it discoverable.
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.
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.