That time I accessed a11y

This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is “No way!?”, hosted by Alex Hsu. I saw “a11y” recently and it reminded me of my “No way!?” moment when I finally figured out, after years of puzzlement, what it meant. For the longest time, I thought it was a fanciful way of spelling “ally,” but that didn’t make sense in context so I just moved on. I can’t remember how I learned that it is short for “accessibility” — the “11” standing in for the 11 letters between the “a” and the “y.” It might have been around the same I figured out that “i18n” stands for “internationalization.” While researching this post, I learned that these are known as numeronyms, and that there are plenty of others. l10n = localization k8s = kubernetes m17n = multilingualization c14n = canonicalization p13n = personalization I can’t say I’ve run into any of these in the wild, likely because they are mainly used by developers within their communities. Getting back to my “No way!?” moment with…