There are several equally useless failure modes I’ve seen with this, a few off the top of my head:
- rendering fails, everything falls apart
- some elements disappear
- it drops into the feature-limited mobile view
- the author or framework overrides zoom with some other behavior — this one makes me especially crazy because they had to do *extra work* to screw up accessibility
Just tested, hn breaks if you zoom >110%.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
Support efforts for computer vision based browsers, MCP and APIs.
Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility. Just make the damn page accessible already. Actually, more like make sure you don't break the accessibility that's there by default with correctly written plain HTML.
Why? It's the right tool for the job.
> Just make the damn page accessible already.
Oh so just modify every website and expect the disabled people to wait while this happens?
This disabled web browser industry doesn't care about disabled people. Their solutions don't work, disabled browsers are expensive because government grants are given to purchase them.
Yes you just need every website to use it, rather than fixing the client. Which is the 'boil the ocean' strategy mentioned in the comment you're replying to.
> ARIA can help when devs want to use the wrong elements for some reason or for custom controls.
But it can't. See this article.
Do you have any sources to back these claims up?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237159
> Do you have any sources to back these claims up?
Yes, asides from the article, check the prices of browsers from the disability industry and consider for yourself whether it's logically easier to fix every website or make a client that can adapt existing webpages.
Even what's described in the article basically boils down to "You can label things, but not generic things (for some reason?), unless that generic thing is a <section> or has a popover attr in which case it magically works." And this isn't even one of the "hard" accessibility things!
My personal gripe is their refusal to support restarting heading levels within sections, causing whole classes of problems with CMS templating.
I'm not aware of any accessibility reasons to not simply use a <dialog> element for dialogs. For it to be a modal dialog, it must be opened using the `.showModal()` method or the invoker command `command="show-modal"`.
The hack of needing to implement roving tabindex techniques is not due to the failings of accessibility tools but because of web standards have not yet provided an alternative (adding the `focusgroup` attribute to the HTML standard is in the works).
I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.
I think there is truth in this. A lot of the assistive technology (AT) vendors, also sell consultancy.
Go to the Vispero career pages (who develop JAWS for Windows) and a big chunk of the jobs are remote consultancy roles advising clients on accessibility errors and selling for billable hours.
What makes a web page accessible? Why, it has to work with JAWS, of course!
Vispero makes a lot of money from this; the consultants are all in India, the clients are all in the West, so they can hoover up the difference. I get the impression most AT vendors are extremely cheap, which may explain why it takes decades for them to improve things
It's way way simpler than, say, var hoisting in JavaScript.
Not be able to aria-label anything and have the screen reader say ok I take that in priority seems badly thought out.
Also - screenreaders could have a setting to read aria-label on divs and then read the content if the user wanted it. If the user determined the labels on divs were inadequate, they would flip this setting, if they decided this seems to be working well they would just go with what the site does.
It sucks, and arguably has the opposite effect, but this came from the same people who thought cookie banners were a good solution to anything, so ... what did we expect?
The issue is not accessibility itself. I'm all for making things simpler. The issue is that the EU framework combines broad principles, partial technical references, vague proportionality requirements, and evolving judicial interpretation. In practice, that means the exact compliance boundary is often only defined by a judge during litigation, and with the website operator funding the clarification process through lawyer and court fees.
That is precisely the kind of legal environment that creates serial-litigation ecosystems like the ADA lawsuit industry in the US.
With systems becoming increasingly more complex, testing all potential code paths increases effort exponentially. With content being user-generated, not necessarily system-generated, you now technically need an editorial watchdog position that greenlights every change (if only to prevent Sally from Sales to post a meme in copy without a proper alt text, or worse, an infographic, without a wall of text describing the infographic in great detail).
And for the attacker, they only need to find one case of violation - while you need to be correct 100% of the time.
The only two ways to migitate such issues are
1. do not offer the service in Europe at all and actively prevent EUians from acessing any part of them - which becomes increasingly attractive (disclaimer: I am an EUian, unfortunately),
2. implement defensive overcompliance far beyond practical usability requirements, or
3. accept ongoing legal uncertainty and budget for it accordingly.
Unfortunately, "just build reasonable software and trust common sense" is not a stable legal strategy anymore.
Still, a nice concise read if you can get it