Guest Blog – A11y and Ally: Cross-Alliance of the Disenfranchised

Recently, my family and I got a vanity plate for our car. We drive a very nondescript (also known as boring) car, and once we found out that personalizing it is really not very expensive, we went for it. Because Accessibility is a bit of a family business for us, we got the North Carolina license plate that reads A11Y. A11Y, as many readers of this site might know, stands for ‘accessibility’, because the word has 11 letters between the ‘a’ and the ‘y’. What we had not realized (but probably should have) was that people who are not familiar with the digital accessibility effort would read our license plate as ‘Ally’. This was an unintended consequence, but a welcome one.