Do you know what's not accessible?
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg I had to look this up, which essentially confirms your point.
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg yes! I keep reading it as “ally”
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg That and I18n can do one.
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg I agree, if it's not used appropriately, it has approximately zero acceptability.
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg I wonder what the origin story is?
It feels like something someone wrote in a conference talk to crack a gag about making something over-trendy and unintentionally inaccessible.
And people used it as a joke to each other so much that the funny wore off and it accidentally got adopted. -
@jonathanhogg I wonder what the origin story is?
It feels like something someone wrote in a conference talk to crack a gag about making something over-trendy and unintentionally inaccessible.
And people used it as a joke to each other so much that the funny wore off and it accidentally got adopted.@jtruk @jonathanhogg the general form (a11y, i18n, k8s) has been around a while now.
I think i18n came first, probably because it was easier than repeatedly having the "internationalisation vs internationalization" spelling debate...
But I have seen it said that "k8s" was first because no one could remember how to spell (or pronounce) kubernetes?
Either way, I absolutely hate that this has just become how the tech industry abbreviates things.
It feels like it's on the "smug" side of clever
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@jtruk @jonathanhogg the general form (a11y, i18n, k8s) has been around a while now.
I think i18n came first, probably because it was easier than repeatedly having the "internationalisation vs internationalization" spelling debate...
But I have seen it said that "k8s" was first because no one could remember how to spell (or pronounce) kubernetes?
Either way, I absolutely hate that this has just become how the tech industry abbreviates things.
It feels like it's on the "smug" side of clever
@lpbkdotnet @jtruk Wikipedia believes that i18n was coined in the 70s and is DEC's fault. Since humans read word-at-a-time by shape, I consider them all to be instances of "I am too lazy to type and therefore you will have to work harder to read"
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@lpbkdotnet @jtruk Wikipedia believes that i18n was coined in the 70s and is DEC's fault. Since humans read word-at-a-time by shape, I consider them all to be instances of "I am too lazy to type and therefore you will have to work harder to read"
@jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet None of this excludes 'a11y' being a joke that got out of hand. I think that's a pretty strong candidate here!
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@jonathanhogg yes! I keep reading it as “ally”
@CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg me too! I’m glad I’m not the only one
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg I also had to look this up (apart from k8s since my brother works on calico, and it actually sounds vaguely like the actual word). So yeah, and as a system architect - no developers should not be using this shorthand in API's - developers should learn to f&^king spell and express themselves clearly in code/docs/etc or have their work QA'd by people who can 🙂
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
A8y! I c8y a3e!
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@lpbkdotnet @jtruk Wikipedia believes that i18n was coined in the 70s and is DEC's fault. Since humans read word-at-a-time by shape, I consider them all to be instances of "I am too lazy to type and therefore you will have to work harder to read"
@jonathanhogg @lpbkdotnet @jtruk But it helps sometimes: try to go a interoperability meeting and you'll see why saying "i14y" is much more pratical.
Whatever the case, in my texts I always put an abbreviation with the expanded term right in the beginning. If it's seldom used, I only write the expanded form.
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@CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg me too! I’m glad I’m not the only one
@themediumkahuna Oh, does it not? Even knowing it references accessibility, I still assumed it was to be read as "ally."
I hereby declare its use even dumber than I thought.
@CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg -
Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
"But it looks like ally, it's great"
Fuck you Jean-Eude. People should not do gatekeeping for something that important.
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@themediumkahuna Oh, does it not? Even knowing it references accessibility, I still assumed it was to be read as "ally."
I hereby declare its use even dumber than I thought.
@CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg@themediumkahuna
'xsablt' would even make more sense...
@CatherineFlick @jonathanhogg -
Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg someone wrote a brilliant post about that:
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg never once have I heard "a11y," and I've been doing this nonsense for a long time. I venture that anyone who uses it in a serious way and expects others to understand is a pretentious wanker trying to convince themselves that they're intelligent.
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Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
@jonathanhogg at the very minimum, you'd want to do this before publishing:
sed -e 's/a11y/accessibility/g' mydocument
Yes, i will explain this if anyone doesn't speak
Linux. -
Do you know what's not accessible? Writing "a11y" in any article or documentation
I will accept it as a convenience in APIs since developers are lazy and can't spell, but fuck off with using it in text
Final note on this: I’m not gonna name and shame the thing I was reading, but maybe if you want to convince me how great an idea is for accessibility on the web, you could try using proper words that I can actually read
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@matt "quantity has a quality all its own". Maybe I can write better code, given sufficient time. I can certainly write more concise code (especially in Perl).
But, the models write code an order of magnitude faster than I can, and they can write code 24/7. And, honestly, it's pretty good code, most of the time.
It's still true that the hardest part is deciding what to make rather than making it, but it's drastically easier to write software now with the AI than doing it myself.
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@swelljoe yup. But if you use it as a tool to assist you, you can assist yourself. I found that out yesterday.
https://berryvilleiml.com/2026/02/18/using-gemini-in-the-silver-bullet-reboot/
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@swelljoe That's interesting considering that if I'm not mistaken (based on your work on Webmin/Virtualmin), one of your best languages is Perl. I never seriously got into Perl, but it has a reputation for being quite expressive. So in theory, you should be able to express what you want directly in the language. It feels wrong that giving instructions to an LLM, in ambiguous natural language, and having it grind away, is kicking your ass even in a language like Perl. Like a failure of PL design.
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@clayote I mean, there are still problems it can't solve, but that set is much smaller than you would think if you last looked at it seriously any time up until a few months ago. The models now can search the web, instrument software so they can test without human intervention, and plan quite large/complicated projects for implementation across several context windows.
When driven by an expert, there is very little it can't do, and it does it all very, very, rapidly.
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@clayote it is quite wrong, as of October of last year, when the current crop of models arrived. As of Opus 4.5, Codex 5.2, and Gemini 3, when used in an agentic context (e.g. Claude Code), they're not limited to simple/repetitive code or code that is prominent in the training data.
The training data is "the entire internet and all of public Github", so it knows every language, every framework. Yeah, it's better at simple CRUD apps in TypeScript, but it also kicks my ass in my best languages.
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@clayote @swelljoe I'd say that was true not that long ago, but not necessarily now. More likely to be true of those people who don't even look at the output, which I think is atrocious.
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@noplasticshower yeah, I'm confident that many, if not all, of the major models have ingested the thousands of posts I've made to the forum I maintain for the OSS projects I work on. I feel ambivalent about that. On one hand, if someone is asking ChatGPT for help with my software, I'd rather it give reasonable answers than dangerous ones.
But, also, it sucks that the way it does that kind of thing is DDoSing my websites periodically and blatantly disregarding copyright or licenses.
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@swelljoe As a non-user of AI (lucky), my impression was that in the areas it works well in -- repetitive codebases that resemble ones in the training dataset -- the productivity increase also incurs technical debt at a rate higher than if you'd gotten some junior coders to do it; is that wrong?
