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No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

(www.w3.org)
125 points robin_reala | 1 comments | 03 Dec 25 08:39 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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devinprater ◴[09 Dec 25 11:09 UTC] No.46203583[source]▶
There are thousands of blind people on the net. Can't you hire one of them to test for you? Please?
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m12k ◴[09 Dec 25 11:24 UTC] No.46203668[source]▶
If you don't want this to break eventually, you need it tested every time your CI/CD test suite runs. Manual testing just doesn't cut it
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cenamus ◴[09 Dec 25 11:58 UTC] No.46203955[source]▶
AI in your CI pipeline won't help either then, if it randomly gives different answers
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1. zamadatix ◴[09 Dec 25 12:17 UTC] No.46204108[source]▶
So does hiring a person or tests which rely on entropy because exhaustive testing is infeasible. If you can wrangle the randomness (each has different ways of going about that) then you end up with very useful tests in all 3 scenarios, but only automated tests scale to running every commit. You probably still want the non-automated tests per release or something as well if you can, depending what you're doing, but you don't necessarily want only invariant tests in either case.