Which brings up an interesting point: If we’re truly interested in shortening long words for use as hashtags, why aren’t we using hexadecimal notation in our numeronyms? Lowercase letters should designate letters from the original word; uppercase letters would designate hexadecimal values. And, of course, case would not be absolutely required; we could tell that the first and last letters came from the original word and all in between was a hex value. So instead of #a11y, we could use #aBy. Same concept, but using a more compact system of notation enables us to save that crucial character.

Of course, I’m saying this with tongue in cheek. Of course #a11y works better. Those ones *look* like “ells,” and the next-to-last letter in “accessibility” is an “ell,” and they’re simple vertical strokes, as are so many of the letters in, well, in the second half of “accessibility.” So there’s a *visual* cue that makes #a11y work better.

Unless you’ve never seen the shape of numbers and letters. Then it makes no sense at all. In Twitter, to conserve characters we should count in a system that makes numeronyms as compact as possible, without regard for vague cues that only some can detect.

“Access” (the word) has deep rooted connotations within the disabled community, and not all of them are positive. As I was recently reminded, Access can also apply to Broadband coverage, yet that is not what we are talking about, and we want to be very clear about that. I must respect that (and I do, very personally), and to be clear I seek not to re-open or redefine the difference between access and accessibility, only to solve a much smaller problem: using #a11y as a hash-tag kinda sucks too.

You stated that you “…rarely use numeronyms in writing…” and this is one sentiment that you are not alone in. So let’s stop using a11y.

Hash-tags are less than metadata in many ways, as we do not want to actually define anything with them, we simply want to tag tweets with an identifier (shared) so that others can use and find those tweets too. If I had suggested to replace #a11y with #qzp would that be any more or less meaningful, if, by unanimous agreement we all understood that when we tagged a tweet with that token, we would know that it meant accessibility, and technology and accessibility? That the tweet didn’t relate just to #pwd (people with disabilities) specifically, of just web accessibility as I practice it, or notices of a PBS special about the day in the life of a guide dog? Rather just the general notion that if any of the above might interest you, by following or searching on that small token you might discover interesting new bits of information, all via a small token; this is to me the real value of hash-tags.

So I proposed a string, a short one, as a possible replacement to the 4 character string “a11y”. It was cutesy clever, and one *could* read the slightest of meaning into it (because access *is* the root of accessibility, but in a specific way) for those who might come across it for the first time – as all have noted however, you *learn* what a hash-tag means, sometimes quickly (like at a conference) or over time (by seeing it used by people who interest you on twitter) – but you learn that a small string ‘tags’ info you are interested in. Honestly however, any string of characters that we agreed to would have worked.

Earlier this week Twitter announced that tweeters could “Add Any Metadata To Any Tweet Starting Next Quarter” so perhaps in many ways this conversation is too late. Hopefully we will as a community come up with richer but equally easy means of attaching better metadata to tweets than we’ve been afforded to date. I suspect that hash-tags will fade from sight in due time.

It’s been an interesting conversation for me. It’s opened up some thought to how we agree as a community to interact with each other, and has given me yet another insight to our world. Thanks to all that participated (and keep using #AxS if you want to; why not?)