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What Is A11Y?

by Andrew Woods February 9, 2010 4 Comments

You may have recently seen ‘a11y’ and thought “what is a11y? what does it mean?”. The answer is accessibility. More specifically, it is an abbreviation for the word accessibility. The number 11 represents the number of letters between “a” and “y”.

Why not just type accessibility? It’s used in contexts where character lengths are limited, like Twitter and SMS. On Twitter, you may see some permutations that have airport codes appended to it. For example #a11ybos and #a11ysea are hash tags used by a groups, in Boston and Seattle respectively, who are organizing an Accessibility Camp.

Why the weird abbreviation? A11y is numeronym. Other common numeronyms are i18n and L10n for internationalization and localization respectively.

Andrew Woods Andrew Woods http://mastodonlabs.com Andrew is the Founder of Mastodon Labs. He has been working on websites since 1999. He enjoys designing and developing interesting data-driven websites, passionate about accessibility, and a karaoke rockstar in his own mind.

4 Responses to “What Is A11Y?”

  1. Tweets that mention What is A11Y? | Mastodon Labs | Website Design, Accessibility, Usability | Seattle WA -- Topsy.com says:
    2010-Feb-09 at 5:25 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Web Axe, Andrew Woods, Mastodon Labs, topsy_top20k, topsy_top20k_en and others. topsy_top20k_en said: New post: What is a11y? http://bit.ly/9uOPtN [...]

  2. uberVU - social comments says:
    2010-Feb-10 at 1:19 pm

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by awoods: New post: What is a11y? http://bit.ly/9uOPtN...

  3. wykydtron says:
    2010-Mar-10 at 12:29 am

    I would appreciate more visual materials, to make your blog more attractive, but your writing style really compensates it. But there is always place for improvement

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