What is accessibility
According to the Wikipedia: "Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" (i.e. unassisted) and "indirect access" meaning compatibility with a person's assistive technology(for example, computer screen readers)."
To put it in the simplest possible words: accessibility is a way of building products in the way they are accessible for everyone - including but not limited to people with disabilities. We should remember about people who use the Internet in a different way than majority of us. Some of the problems are persisten - like blindness, deafness or cognitive problems. People suffers from them are mostly using special assistive technologies like special keyboards and screen readers. But there is also a second category - temporary problems - e.g. broken hand or 2 weeks of blindness after cataract surgery. In this case users are not using specialistic equipment and don't want to spend a lot of time learning assistive technologies. As developers we should support both categories of problems and create products available for everyone.
Many people wonder why the shortcut for accessibility is a11y. It's easy - just take a look at the picture below. Just take the first and the last letters from the word "accessibility" and add a number of letters between them (11). That's all!
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