Eric Bailey eviscerates the notion that the term “a11y” isn’t accessible. It’s a hot take that I’ve had myself, embarrassingly enough.
I never see people asking why WWI is written out the way it is, either. Won’t people confuse that with the first Wonder Woman movie? Or the first season of Westworld? Or some new Weight Watchers product? I also never see people questioning technical numeronyms like P2P, S3, or W3C?
If you are seeing the term for the first time and are confused, it’s extremely easy to search for and figure out. There are heaping piles of examples of people using it for very legitimate sites, products, conferences, and more. It’s no more of a spell-checking foul as any other industry jargon and easy enough to ignore.
Plus, you can always introduce it with semantic HTML:
Like any other abbreviation, I observe the Web Content Accessibility Guideline’s (WCAG) Success Criterion 3.1.4. Like any other acronym or industry jargon, I spell out the term in full the first time it appears in my writing, then follow it up with the acronym it represents:
Accessibility (<abbr>a11y</abbr>)
It reminds me of the term serverless. The obligatory hot take on it is that servers are still in use, but the quicker you get over it, the quicker you can get to realizing it’s a powerful industry-changing idea.