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
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...
Just tested, hn breaks if you zoom >110%.
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.
1080px wide (aka on my vertical monitor) HN comments stop reflowing > 300%
At 1920px wide it never stops reflowing.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
It took until 2023 to support nesting, something that was so obvious that preprocessors have had it since at least 2006.
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.
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?
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.