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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: 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. burningChrome ◴[09 Dec 25 16:19 UTC] No.46206728[source]▶
Keep in mind, this is only one area of accessibility. Neurodiverse users, users with cognitive issues, users that have a hard time using a mouse, low vision users and even deaf users all have specific issues.

Simply testing with a screen reader is missing entire groups of users.

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2. tracker1 ◴[09 Dec 25 16:53 UTC] No.46207250[source]▶
+1 on this one... I've mentioned it a few times in these threads already... but for the love of all that is holy, try your mobile website/app in an actual phone where you have accessibility turned up for text and display.

I cannot tell you how many times I've experienced modals with buttons literally off screen and no navigation option in apps from multi-billion and trillion dollar tech companies. Almost as bad is gmail allowing text to scale so insanely large that it's equally unusable.