Acronyms Are Bad. Very Bad.

The curious case of the inaccessible acronyms, chief among them being LGBTQIAN+ and WYSIWYG…

Letters. Those squiggly things we turn into sounds and expect others to decode into words that make sense to them. We have used them for a long time. Letters and words, that is. History might even say we’ve done quite a good job at it. We’ve all gotten past the ol’ Tower of Babel confusion, and many peoples even decided to adopt each other’s languages or adopt a common one. We have lingua francas, and believe it or not, the world even agreed to use one common language for aviation — English. You’d be forgiven to think we’re on a roll here, and after a few millennia we’re really crushing this language thing we use to communicate. I’m here to tell you, we’re not. In fact, we’re doing a terrible job at it.

I am trilingual — Hungarian, Romanian, and English. I have spoken all three of them for most of my life. Three languages isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but the three languages I speak, just so happen to be in three different language families and that is a bit of a big deal, as it gives me three very different perspectives when it comes to language and acronyms, and let me tell you…

Acronyms are the single most terrible concept introduced in any language. And it only gets worse…

Acronyms are not accessible

Throw your memory back a bit and remember just how many times you used an acronym and ended up having to explain yourself? Plenty of times, I’m sure. I used to work at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and we were notoriously bad at coming up with acronyms. It got so bad that during team building every year we played the game of “guess the acronym”. Our own acronyms. 🤣 If you got 40% of them right, you were considered a veteran and secretly everyone wondered why you were still there. Now, wouldn’t it have been easier to just use proper words instead and not have to explain yourself half the time? I think, yes.

While acronyms may have become for many of us muscle memory, a reflex to say DIY (do it yourself) shop, a PCB (printed circuit board), IDE (integrated development environment) or a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor purely because we understand them, and therefore we make the assumption that everyone else does, and makes conversation more efficient. If you get down to it, it’s actually not. The moment you find yourself having to explain it, you haven’t just lost that presumed efficiency, you also broke the flow of communication, and spent far more time saying the same thing as if you would have just said the words themselves, such as printed circuit board, or do it yourself shop.

From an accessibility perspective, we should also start considering the cognitive load these acronyms introduce. Is it at all necessary to resort to them, or are we just being lazy? Does it actually look better in a document when we keep using acronyms “for brevity’s sake”? I tend to find that documents relying heavily on acronyms are much tougher to read, as I always have to correlate them to the actual words they represent. We ought to remember that cognitive load is something we all deal with. All day, every day. A bit of extra load here, and a bit there, it all adds up during the day. If you happen to have learning difficulties or something as common as dyslexia, it gets even worse.

Beyond cognitive load, you must also consider the social and interpersonal impact of relying on acronyms. Nine out of ten times in a meeting-room — be that physical or digital — you’ll have at least one person who isn’t familiar with all the acronyms being used in a conversation. More often than not, they’ll either feel unnecessarily embarrassed for not knowing what’s being talked about, or feel compelled to interrupt the speaker to ask for clarification, creating potentially awkward moments.

It gets even worse when certain individuals will get offended by acronyms being used incorrectly. Take for instance LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender). There are (some, not all) people who will take offence and voice it very loudly, because they will feel that it ignores half the community. From their perspective, everyone should know that the latest version is LGBTQIAN+, even those who don’t speak or have English as their first language.

Acronyms create far more communication problems than solve, and have no regard for accessibility.

English acronyms are even worse

Not because they’re English per se, but because thanks to the internet and social media, these are the acronyms that spread the fastest across continents and languages. They become part of our vocabulary without actually having any meaning in any other language. This creates unnecessary language barriers within our own individual languages, as most people don’t actually speak English. Yet, there is an expectation that people understand certain English words and acronyms, because well… doesn’t everyone know them?

At fault are those of us — myself included — who grew up in an environment highly influenced by English education and content. Whether we like to admit it or not, it’s a type of snobbery that many of us fall victims to. Both the Hungarian and Romanian media often rely on English words and acronyms to say things that could have very well been said in our respective languages. Yet, we opt not to, spreading these acronyms willy-nilly, not thinking twice of the impact it has on language, communication, and accessibility.

Take for instance the famous WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) acronym. In Hungarian, you’d pronounce it as “vizivig”, which just so happens to mean “aquatic happy”. To that, my dad would say, “explain yourself, grasshopper”. In Romanian, it has no meaning at all, so I’d just get blank stares. And if your gut reaction is, “oh, but everyone knows WYSIWYG”. No. No. You’re doing it again. You’re projecting. It’s an acronym as unnecessary as DIY (do it yourself). DIY shops in Hungarian are just “barkácsbolt” where the “bolt” part means shop. The rest, “barkács” comes from the “barkácsol” verb meaning something similar to building stuff yourself.

The next example is a tad more sensitive, but please hear me out. Dear LGBTQ+ community, I’m not trying to rain on your parade — pun intended, but while you’re fighting for inclusivity and recognition, you are creating one of the most non-inclusive identifiers for your community that language has ever seen. This may sound controversial to some, but what’s wrong with just calling it the sexually diverse community? If we have gender diversity, we can just as well have a sexually diverse community, or something along those lines. You decide. You’re the experts. First, it was — in my lifetime — the lesbian and gay community (LG). LG (not the company) soon became LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender). But it didn’t feel inclusive enough, so we ended up with LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer).

The ‘plus’ is used to signify all of the gender identities and sexual orientations that letters and words cannot yet fully describe. — gaycenter.org

But wait… that still wasn’t enough, it’s now LGBTQIAN+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, nonbinary) and maybe by the end of the decade, we’ll add four or five more letters, because eight characters somehow still wasn’t enough. I hate to put it like this, but many people don’t have passwords that long. Why? Because they can’t remember them!

Poorly designed, ever-changing acronyms are not helping diversity. They make it a confusing, inaccessible communication minefield.

But I’m not done throwing stones yet. As much as I love being an accessibility advocate and have spent years already trying to make the web a better place for everyone, the web accessibility industry also needs to take a hard look at itself, because our acronyms are just as rampant and useless as all the others. WAI-ARIA is a technical specification published by the W3C aiming to help improve A11Y in web pages and ePubs using HTML, AJAX, JS, and other related technologies. If none of that made any sense to you, I don’t blame you, but the reality is that many accessibility documents and conversations use this exact language when talking about accessibility (A11Y). Again, very unnecessary.

WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative — Accessible Rich Internet Applications) could very well just be “modern web apps”. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) should get off its geriatric high horse and drop the “World Wide” bit. It’s 2023. It’s just the web. We know it’s world wide. Unless you’re in North Korea. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) can be “web markup”, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) can be basically nothing because virtually everything modern uses JavaScript (JS) anyway.

Oh, and while we’re on technology. What’s up with PC? Is it “personal computer”, or “political correctness”? Or maybe it’s a politically correct personal computer? 🤷‍♂️

Are we really this lazy?

This is a question I often ask myself when it comes to accessibility in general, not just acronyms. What are we really trying to solve? Are we just too lazy to say complete words, come up with good words, or are we both lazy and ignorant towards our collective much more important need of effective communication? Because surely littering our language with acronyms is anything but effective and creates communication barriers and mazes instead of breaking them down.

Instead of coming up with good, translatable, descriptive words, we choose to go with acronyms, the abbreviated single-letter representation of a group of words. These, we then have to remember, yet we frequently don’t. I have been using an IDE (integrated development environment) for over a decade, and yet as I was thinking of what it stands for, all I could think was “you know, that thing I use to write code in, like VSCode. Oh, crap, what does VS stand for again?” 🤦‍♂️

It might be considered a hot take, but acronyms are kind of stupid. They’re very unimaginative, often just words strung together into a sentence, then reduced to a subset of letters. Sure, they have their place in situations where time is of the essence, like SOS (save our souls), military abbreviations or those used in emergency services. Almost everywhere else, they create more problems than solve. In most cases, they’re neither unique, nor really useful. It’s ironic how, for instance, TMI (too much information) is actually quite the opposite — not enough information. It has over 15 meanings. And no, context isn’t a given.

The next time you’re tempted to use an acronym, maybe don’t. Just use words. They’re still in fashion, and they’re accessible too. 😉

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.