I've read around on the internet and I've heard people say
Access specifiers ::
The access specifier determines how accessible the field is to code in other classes. Access ranges from totally accessible to totally inaccessible. You can optionally declare a field with an access specifier keyword: public, private, or protected.
Access Modifiers ::
You can optionally declare a field with a modifier keyword: final or volatile and/or static and/or transient, abstract, etc.
Is there any difference at all? Because most definitions for access modifiers and access specifiers state the same thing.. which seems so ambiguous.
In this context, you can think of access specifiers as protection specifiers -- they specify where a variable can be accessed from. By contrast, access modifiers are completely different; they specify how variables should (or should not) be accessed; e.g. read-only, volatile, etc.
i.e., a variable can be public but read-only, or it can be private and writable -- the access specifiers have nothing to do with the modifiers.
However, I'm a little surprised that the terminology is for C#, since Microsoft actually calls public and private "access modifiers", and it calls volatile and readonly just plain "modifiers".