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...
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).
Still, a nice concise read if you can get it
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.
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.
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.
It took until 2023 to support nesting, something that was so obvious that preprocessors have had it since at least 2006.
> And for the attacker, they only need to find one case of violation - while you need to be correct 100% of the time.
I don't know how European regulators work but even in the litigious U.S., this is not true, at least not in the courts. However, for small businesses, which are more likely to be targeted by the trolls, the cost of proceeding far enough to get a suit dismissed is burdensome. And in the EU, I thought individuals couldn't bring cases to a judge, they have to complain to a regulatory body that can decide whether proceeding is warranted or not.
> implement defensive overcompliance far beyond practical usability requirements
This is like complaining about having fewer grams of rat turd in your flour than legally mandated; "Oh no, we made our product too good!"
In practice, building "reasonable software" has never included making it work for people with disabilities, despite WCAG and the web standards themselves existing for decades.
EU regulations get made into member state laws, and these vary massively in who can sue through what way.
In Germany, for example, a common enforcement vector is the "Abmahnung" under unfair competition law. In theory, if a regulation imposes costs on compliant businesses, competitors should not gain an advantage by ignoring it.
The problem is that this has historically created an ecosystem of professional cease-and-desist mills. A competitor (or an organisation acting on their behalf) identifies a violation, sends a lawyer's letter, demands reimbursement of legal costs, and requests a cease-and-desist declaration with contractual penalties for future violations.
Whether the underlying issue is accessibility, consumer protection, labeling requirements, privacy notices, or something else is almost secondary. Once compliance becomes sufficiently complex, the enforcement mechanism itself becomes a business model. The cynic in me can't help but notice that our parliaments are made up disproportionately by lawyers.
That is why many businesses are worried less about accessibility itself and more about legal uncertainty around accessibility requirements. The concern is not "making websites accessible is bad."
The concern is that compliance costs are barely predictable, while litigation risk arising from ambiguous compliance boundaries is not.
Not all accessibility tools are expensive:
- NVDA is free and open source
- Narrator is included with windows
- Voiceover is included with macOS and iOS
- Orca is free and open source.
- Talkback comes with Android
- Chromevox comes with Chrome OSYes it is. Webpages semantically provide information on the purpose of onscreen elements by their appearance. Vast quantities of humans ensure the semantic information is there by using the websites. Websites that do not convery semantic information through their appeareance will die, because nobody is using them.
> Not all accessibility tools are expensive
I want to acknowledge your point here - the situation may have improved the last time I looked at accessibility tools, which at the time was mainly overpriced badly maintained proprietary software. I still think the "boil the ocean" strategy is discredited and wrong.
I do use ChatGPT to research things, but I don't usually see that as accessibility solution. I completely agree that screen readers and browsers would benefit from AI, as they already are; Chrome and Edge can generate missing image descriptions. AI can certainly enhance accessibility, but it can't replace the existing technology that already works quite well a lot of the time.
The other positive about AI for accessibility is that the frontier models have a good understanding of what works. Instead of learning all the guidelines, you can just ask an agent to review the page for accessibility and fix any problems.
I realise I am only looking at it from a screen reader point of view, and yes, we are quite a small minority. But good universal design helps everyone, whether they just need to zoom the page for comfort without it breaking, their eyes are not that of a young person, they have dexterity issues using a mouse, and many more. Accessibility in general isn't serving a tiny minority,. I imagine most of us will come to appreciate it in some way.
You don't need to pay for a specialist browser as all web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc.) will implement the native accessibility model of the operating system they are running on (IAccessible/MSAA for Windows, etc.).
In Firefox you can press the right mouse button and select "Inspect Accessibility Properties" or select the "Accessibility" tab from the developer window and it will show the accessibility tree (roles, states, properties, etc.) just like the DOM tree in the "Inspect" tab. That is what the browser is displaying to screen readers and other accessibility software and uses the behaviour of the HTML elements along with the ARIA roles/states/properties defined by the webpage to construct that tree. Thus, it will display an ol/ul as a `role=list` unless overridden to be e.g. a `tablist` by the website.
See https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-implementation/ for a specification on how browsers should implement HTML and ARIA to different operating system accessibility APIs.
See specifically https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/practices/names-and-descript... for details on naming. That has extensive notes and details for labeling elements correctly.
See https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/components/ for bootstrap markup on creating accessible components.
There are plenty of other resources.
You also said that ARIA can't help with custom controls in that post, which is where the other links are applicable as they describe doing just that. I.e. using ARIA tags to implement tabs, accordions, etc. either with or without a framework library.
Anyway, an extension should solve it.
A propos image tricks sites pull, I've noticed before the right click for images don't work at all in Instagram web, I wonder how they do that, probably background on a div.
I think that is the up until about 2020 way, the modern way is using clamp to do it
https://css-tricks.com/linearly-scale-font-size-with-css-cla...
No, it's not. Why should disabled users be forced to indirectly interact with a webpage via a non-deterministic agent, rather than directly interact with one that's specifically designed to accommodate them?
Because a world where that happens consistently doesn't exist, it hasn't existed for the last 20 years we've been using ARIA tags, and won't ever exist.
1. A robust set of web primitives that are accessible by default, and
2. A government that will actually enforce laws (which already exist!) requiring websites to be accessible
As a developer, however, get your shit fixed! And that fixing doesn't involve any MCP. Don't expect visitors to run AI...
Why not? That's a more reasonable expectation than asking every website to change.
I won't blame a disabled user seeking AI-based tools to browse the web to survive with what they have, but I will totally blame the devs who created the situation.
Indeed I'm not sure what edge case I might expect to find given the ability of using clamp in conjunction with @media.
That’s not how that expression works. The ocean is every website. An individual developer cannot modify every website.
More to the point, most websites are not accessible, will not validate, and this will never be the case.
The very first "quality of life" thing I do when I install a new computer / operating system nowadays is double (sometimes triple) the default font size. 12pt was probably fine when our monitors were 640x480, and when we were 18 years old.
I think we might need a little more information than just the OS to differentiate.
1080px wide (aka on my vertical monitor) HN comments stop reflowing > 300%
At 1920px wide it never stops reflowing.
I didn't write the post. The author believes in ARIA, I believe ARIA is fundamentally broken.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281764:
> > 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.
As mentioned ARIA has had 20 years to succeed before my Hacker News post. ARIA will continue to fail with or without me.
ARIA attributes are only one of the tools to help with web page accessibility and are somewhat last resort when you can't do what you aim to do with bare HTML.
The first tool is to not break stuff in the first place.
The solution to "accessibility is not ideal across the world" is certainly not "Outright avoid tagging stuff for accessibility anyway", as if using ARIA attributes were somewhat harmful. It's not, unless you misuse them, and no, the spec isn't unworkable, and you also don't have to use it all.
The response to "software is broken" is not "software has had 50+ years to be bug free, let's put the burden on the users to deal with it since obviously developers can't do bug free".
I feel that claiming the web now consistently complies with ARIA is an incredibly bold claim, and the burden of proof is on you but you can test the top 50 websites yourself if you genuinely believe that.
> are somewhat last resort when you can't do what you aim to do with bare HTML
This thinking was popular 20 years ago when ARIA was created. Application-like behaviour, which nearly always means JS, is the majority of websites.
> ARIA attributes were somewhat harmful
Wasted engineering effort on minimally effective outcomes is harmful.
> "software has had 50+ years to be bug free, let's put the burden on the users to deal with it since obviously developers can't do bug free".
Others not following your religion is not a defect.
... that I didn't make
> This thinking was popular 20 years ago when ARIA was created. Application-like behaviour, which nearly always means JS, is the majority of websites.
That's besides the point, your JS code still generates HTML. Writing applications in JS doesn't change anything about the topic.
What I'm saying is that you mostly don't need to use aria attributes with a good HTML structure, generated from JS or not. Use them sparingly when you can do it in pure HTML (again, generated or not).
> Others not following your religion is not a defect.
That's not an answer to the stuff you quoted and there's no religion here.
You have a point about web accessibility lacking but we'll have to disagree about "let's just give up good practice since it's not been perfect despite all these years". Actually, you are not claiming "not perfect", you are claiming "not present", but you're wrong on this as other commenters told you.
> ... that I didn't make
Ok so you agree that the web has not and is unlikely to be ARIA compliant?
But then persist in supporting ARIA despite knowing that goal isn’t and never will be achievable?
That seems exactly like religion.
> you're wrong on this as other commenters told you
As does this. Nobody has refuted the point in the original post that ARIA is a boil the ocean strategy, in face you have just conceded it. What makes you think other commenters disagreeing would change that?
There are imperfections in any piece of furniture and yet we are still building furniture? How religious!
You sound like this to me.
There's a whole world between "accessible HTML is never achieved anywhere" and "accessible HTML is fully achieved everywhere". As other commenters already told you, we are actually mostly there, there's no complete failure here. Sure, shit's not perfect (far from it, sadly...) but I feel like you are throwing the baby with the bath water.
I'm not willing to increase my electricity bill or spend tokens to make up for your unwillingness to use widely accepted - and mandated by law in many cases! - solutions. I'll just pass and probably others will do as well.
I'll stop here, this is not productive, none of us will likely move from where we stand. Let's just say that you are apparently alone in your position here in this discussion and you have so far failed to convince us. Call that position in which everyone here is except you "religion" all you want. I'll even snarkily risk a tu quoque by emphasizing that AI is no magic dust.
Good day.
Because, asides from users interacting with less programs than they do websites it’s not possible for a user to systematically fix all the programs they interact with. You are proposing an 0(n) solution instead of an 0(1) solution.
That should be incredibly obvious before this discussion even started, and even more obvious after reading this far in the thread. You’re replying but you’re not paying attention to what you’re reading. I’m not going to bother continue reading or interacting with you any further.