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No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

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125 points robin_reala | 2 comments | 03 Dec 25 08:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.485s | source
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simonw ◴[09 Dec 25 10:05 UTC] No.46203241[source]▶
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.

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wouldbecouldbe ◴[09 Dec 25 11:21 UTC] No.46203642[source]▶
Not a joke. If truly you want a properly functioning website for blind/bad sight/ Step 1 would probably be to put on a blindfold and go through your website with a screenreader (cmd + f5 on a mac).
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1. simonw ◴[09 Dec 25 11:24 UTC] No.46203670[source]▶
Here are notes from last time I tried that: https://tools.simonwillison.net/aria-live-regions

It's not something I'm comfortable enough with to do on a regular basis though.

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2. wouldbecouldbe ◴[09 Dec 25 11:25 UTC] No.46203677[source]▶
yeah its a real challenge, but probably the only way to really understand it. It's a completely different way of using the web. GPT can really help understand it while doing it.