Making a11y Accessible

What does a11y mean?

If you hang out in the right places on the internet, you may have seen the phase “a11y”. A11y (pronounced a-eleven-y) is short for accessibility. It’s a numeronym which is like an acronym but it includes numbers instead of (only) letters.

Most readers have encountered numeronyms out in the wild that use the English pronunciation of numbers to abbreviate a word e.g. B4 (before), gr8 (great), B2B (business to business). In our case, a11y is a special type of numeronym that has been commonly used in web development contexts where the 11 stands in for the number of letters omitted. In other words:

A11y = a + 11 letters + y.

Another example would be i18n for internationalization or a16z for Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm started by Marc Andreessen (the creator of Mosaic, the original web browser).

A11y is a little confusing

If you have a deep tech background or have spent time in accessibility tech and advocacy communities, using the shorthand a11y is second nature. It takes up less space and everyone knows what you mean. Plus the visual similarity to the word “ally” creates opportunities for great puns when naming products and companies. Not to mention, we need allies right?

And therein lies the problem. We need help from outside these communities to get accessibility onto the agenda and into workflows. The accessibility community puts a ton of energy into advocacy and education. We want stakeholders and decision makers to understand why accessibility is important and to make it a priority within their organizations. And we need individual contributors like designers, developers, and testers to learn how to incorporate accessibility into their work.

In our experience, that audience is more likely than not to have never heard or used the term “a11y”. And the superficial resemblance to ally doesn’t help comprehension. 

This isn’t the biggest problem in the world but…

Most people are perfectly capable of figuring out what a11y means especially if they intend to spend any time in this space. But small barriers to entry are still barriers.

Do we expect a reader who sees one tweet in their feed to Google what a11y means? And do we want to give the impression that you have to know all the lingo to participate in (and ultimately contribute to) these important conversations?

The case for a11y

This post isn’t an original insight. This is a longstanding debate and we aren’t the first to point out that a11y as a term may not be the most accessible. And it’s a big internet out there so some of the people who make this point are not operating in good faith. Some of them are trying to make a clever point at the expense of the accessibility community. Others are ableists who are looking for an excuse to ignore or dismiss the need for accessibility.

It’s frustrating to constantly put up with people fixating on one phrase and ignoring the substantive points you are trying to make. And the community has invested a lot in a11y as a term including product names, forums, and hashtags. When you search for a11y, you’re going to find more relevant content than the broader term “accessibility”. 

So it’s not surprising that the a11y numeronym has strong advocates within the accessibility community. But without erasing the term a11y completely from the record, we still think it’s important to prioritize communicating effectively and clearly to our audience. After all, even when jargon has value, it also imposes a cost on users who need to learn it.

This isn’t controversial in other contexts

“Understandability” is one of the four core principles of accessibility. And as a matter of best practices, it’s not controversial to say that communicating effectively with all users requires being clear about the meaning of abbreviations and other words whose meanings may be unclear.

In fact, proactively defining abbreviations is encoded in WCAG as a Level AAA criteria. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use abbreviations, but it does mean that you should always define them upfront. This way readers are not confused when encountering an abbreviation whose meaning or pronunciation they don’t recognize.

If we zoom out slightly to view some of the other WCAG criteria in the “Understandable” section, you’ll notice that quite a few of them could implicate our use of “a11y”:

• 3.1.3 AAA: Unusual Words
• 3.1.4 AAA Abbreviations
• 3.1.6 AAA Pronunciation

What should we do about it?

As a company, Access Armada has made a conscious effort to spell out the word “accessibility” in our own blog posts and public-facing communications. But we also operate within a larger conversation and often link out to resources that do take understanding of a11y as a given. One of the purposes of this post is to bridge some of that context for our audience.

At the same time, we recognize that the term a11y is pretty entrenched in the year 2024. As we mentioned above, you’ll find a11y baked into company, forum, resource and tool names. We are not advocating to change that (and we wouldn’t be successful even if we tried). But as accessibility professionals, we are used to encountering the world as it is and advocating for changes on the margin.

Our proposed approach is to be intentional about our audiences and who we are communicating with. If you’ve already defined the term or are sure that it’s known jargon the audience is already familiar with, knock yourself out and drop a11ys in your writing to your heart’s desire. 

And if you use #a11y as more of a taxonomy keyword, that is important to making sure your posts are correctly categorized and surfaced within the larger conversation. But if you are putting a11y in the body of your social media post as a space-saver and the meaning becomes ambiguous to readers who are not already in the know, we think it's worthwhile to reconsider.

It’s fine (and important) for there to be an accessibility club and not everything needs to be legible for everyone. But let's be conscious that we want that club to grow and try to both communicate clearly and keep the barriers to entry low.