

There have been so many places in front end web dev that used the abbreviation “a11y” without defining it (or explaining the 11) that for years I assumed it was just the name of a particular library that had gotten Kleenexed.
(To be clear, I’m using “Kleenexed” as a verb here to mean “genericized explosively, as if a sneeze.”)
It didn’t help to look at the code, either. “Okay cool, so all this does is add a bunch of random extra tags to the DOM? Doesn’t seem super useful but okay, I guess there’s probably some tool out there that depends on them but we probably don’t use it.”
I’m a millennial and I did it more than once on hardware older than I was, but because I wanted to, not because there were no other options.