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No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

(www.w3.org)
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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hombre_fatal ◴[09 Dec 25 13:27 UTC] No.46204700[source]▶
MacOS has a VoiceOver tutorial.

It’s pretty eye-opening (heh) to do it and then try to use your websites.

Before you even get to aria labels, you’ll find a lot of things to fix like:

- Add or remove components from tabindex

- Esc should close the modal or the slide-out sidebar

- Closing the sidebar/modal should return focus to the button the user toggled to open it (this one is huge for UX)

I recommend it. These things are useful for keyboard nav in general.

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1. dawnerd ◴[09 Dec 25 16:30 UTC] No.46206920{3}[source]▶
What’s frustrating is you basically are required to use JS when basic css and html would normally work. There’s been some improvements thanks to the dialog and popover apis but it’s still not fully there yet.

Also seems the large companies that have to have compliance only care about it from a legal standpoint and are fine with just making the tests pass from whatever compliance company they use.

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2. tracker1 ◴[09 Dec 25 16:50 UTC] No.46207203[source]▶
Using a good component library goes a long way here... I've yet to see a better overall experience than React+MUI myself. Though you should adjust the default color palette.