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No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

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125 points robin_reala | 4 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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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. tdeck ◴[09 Dec 25 13:49 UTC] No.46204904[source]▶
I always wonder why this isn't a bigger part of the discussion. None of us would develop a visual UI flow without trying it manually at least once, but for some reason this idea isn't extended to discussions about accessibility. The advice always fits into these three groups:

1. Follow a checklist

2. Buy my software

3. Hire blind people to test your app

I'm not saying that these are bad (although some overlay software is actually worse than nothing), but aren't people even a little bit curious to try the user experience you're shipping?

There are popular, free screen readers out there and using one can teach you a lot.

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2. tracker1 ◴[09 Dec 25 16:46 UTC] No.46207153[source]▶
Can't speak for others... and though visually impaired, I don't think I could handle navigating with a screen reader myself. I've sat through blind testing before and it's definitely impressive and I learned a lot. I will say that I do make an effort to do a lot of keyboard only navigation as part of testing. Just that can help a lot in terms of limiting janky UX.

Especially with flexbox and other more modern layout options.

3. BeFlatXIII ◴[09 Dec 25 18:24 UTC] No.46208511[source]▶
Perhaps a blindfolded person and a person who has always been blind have very different expectations of how to use software, such that they would give divergent opinions on what makes a good screen reader UI.
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4. tdeck ◴[10 Dec 25 10:35 UTC] No.46216204[source]▶
In theory this is certainly true. In practice the most common experience is software where UI elements are completely unreachable from the keyboard, and/or have no label at all. If you talk to tech-savvy Blind people for a while you invariably hear things like "the app doesn't have labels but I know the third link is the settings page, so I just count until I hear 'link' 3 times". Most people aren't going to hire an outside person to test their project, and frankly I think that's often reasonable for personal projects and small companies. But if you exercise the UI flow yourself, at least you know it's possible to use it.