FRESH

Hacker News

Home

No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

125 points by robin_reala

by simonw

12 subcomments

Something I'm desperately keen to see is AI-assisted accessibility testing.
I'm not convinced at all by most of the heuristic-driven ARIA scanning tools. I don't want to know if my app appears to have the right ARIA attributes set - I want to know if my features work for screenreader users.
What I really want is for a Claude Code style agent to be able to drive my application in an automated fashion via a screenreader and record audio for me of successful or failed attempts to achieve goals.
Think Playwright browser tests but for popular screenreaders instead.
Every now and then I check to see if this is a solved problem yet.
I think we are close. https://www.guidepup.dev/ looks extremely promising - though I think it only supports VoiceOver on macOS or NVDA on Windows, which is a shame since asynchronous coding agent tools like Codex CLI and Claude Code for web only run Linux.
What I haven't seen yet is someone closing the loop on ensuring agentic tools like Claude Code can successfully drive these mechanisms.

by jillesvangurp

1 subcomments

I've looked a few times at this space. Most of the documentation seems to devolve into a depth first deep dive into here's a bunch of tags and attributes without laying out a coherent goal of what you should be doing.
My observations:
- most web developers have never seen a screen reader version of their application; or any application.
- most teams don't have visually handicapped people that use a screen reader that could provide feedback
- so, no bugs ever get reported regarding accessibility
That is, unless developers go out of their way to use proper tools and do proper testing for this. And testing practices for Aria probably is at the same level as it is for other application features: sketchy to non existent at best.
Let's face it, mostly Aria is pure box ticking for developers. There has to be some (regulations, and PMs insisting because of that). But it doesn't have to be good since nobody really checks these things. Including the PM.
Without a feedback loop, it's not surprising that most web apps don't get this even close to right. IMHO, over time, agentic tools might actually be more helpful to blind people as they can summarize, describe, and abstract what's on the screen. Agentic testing via a screen reader might also become a thing. I've done some testing via the agent mode in chat gpt and it was shockingly good at figuring out our UI. Not a bad process for automating what used to be manual QA. I've been meaning to put more time in this.
I actually have as a very low priority target to start driving some of this in our own application. Mostly that's just a hunch it might come up because of some government customers. But this is Germany and they seem to have lots of blind spots on software quality. I don't actually expect any feedback whatsoever from actual customers or anyone on this. I just want to pre-empt that.

by Bengalilol

2 subcomments

2 cents here. Let's make this article optimistic and forward looking.
That's somehow intriguing to write an article that says "no" without providing "yes" examples. I don't view this as very generous.
Looking for further updates.

by gampleman

5 subcomments

Is this really true? Messaging like this will cause a lot of developers to just give up. Most places I've worked at did accessibility at best as a best effort sort of thing. After reading this, there will be no attempts made to improve the state of affairs.
Perhaps that will be an improvement? I don't know.

by i-con

2 subcomments

No CSS is better than bad CSS
In my browser that "Page Contents" box is hovering above the end of the line, so I can't read the full text. Kind of ironic, that this is on w3.org

by codelikeawolf

0 subcomment

As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to gain a11y expertise and learn best practices, this messaging drives me a little bonkers. There is so much inaccessible content on the web. The official ARIA guide tells you "you're better off doing nothing". All of the example patterns in the ARIA Practices Guide (APG) tell you the code isn't for production use [1]. They provide an explanation which points back to..."you're better off doing nothing".
When I need to add a toolbar to my app, and I want it to be accessible. I look at the APG, the APG has a toolbar example with markup, CSS, and JS, but apparently I'm not supposed to use it. I've been at this for years and it's incredibly frustrating. I usually use the APG code in production anyways. It's probably not catastrophically wrong, but it always makes me feel like I'm screwing something up. The alternative is to use a bunch of divs, spans, and buttons because not all of the patterns have semantic HTML equivalents.
[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/grid/examples/layou...

by burningChrome

1 subcomments

Interesting as a developer coming into accessibility, I was repeatedly told, "The first rule of ARIA is not to use ARIA."
It feels like we've gone so far away from semantical code that ARIA is now being used a crutch to replace semantical approaches to coding.

by wccrawford

1 subcomments

No examples are better than no examples.
They really needed to show what the proper way to implement those scenarios was, as well as the proper way to use those aria properties.
As it stands, they look good, and someone that isn't paying attention is going to think they're correct and use them.

by daveguy

0 subcomment

Since the acronym is not defined anywhere in the link:
ARIA = Accessible Rich Internet Applications
Part of the W3 consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI-ARIA

by emsixteen

2 subcomments

I think it would be very beneficial if the browser vendors, together with screenreader vendors and those who use them, were able to come together to actually unify the approach to how elements/these attributes/etc. are communicated to the end user.

by notpachet

1 subcomments

This is also true of alt text for images. I'm active on Bluesky, and so often I see an image with an "ALT" tag (meaning that the user has specified alt text for the image) only for it to be some meaningless offhand bullshit like "lmao i guess i showed them". Pisses me off.

0 subcomment

by draw_down

0 subcomment

[dead]

by hamonrye

0 subcomment

[dead]

by sapphirebreeze

0 subcomment

MMMKAY?

by tonyhart7

0 subcomment

this is why I don't bother with ARIA

by londons_explore

1 subcomments

The future of accessibility is AI agents.
Ie. Don't make the web page accessible to some ancient screen reader software - instead make sure AI agents can interact with it so the real user can instruct the AI to perform the task on their behalf.