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No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

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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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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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ErroneousBosh ◴[09 Dec 25 12:30 UTC] No.46204226[source]▶
I would very much like to be better at building websites that handle assistive technologies like screen readers well. I don't have a lot of blind users to worry about because they don't let you be a firefighter if you're blind.

But a lot of firefighters are people who simply did not do well in school, even the very senior ones, and that's because they are often very clever people who are of an age where things like dyslexia were just not diagnosed early or often.

So now I deal with a lot of people who use assistive technologies to help with dyslexia and related comorbidities. I have dyscalculia that wasn't diagnosed until I was 19 and at uni, and even then it was diagnosed initially by my mate's Educational Psychology undergrad girlfriend in the pub one evening. That was in the early 90s and we're better at it now - but not by much.

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wouldbecouldbe ◴[09 Dec 25 22:53 UTC] No.46211850{3}[source]▶
Yeah i don't think it's worth doing for every web app. But I do think it's fair that for instance government websites try to meet these criteria.
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1. ErroneousBosh ◴[09 Dec 25 23:40 UTC] No.46212232{4}[source]▶
It's funny what you have to do to tick a box on a Government form. A long time ago when I was relatively new in the job I thought I was being pranked (ohoho let's noise up the new guy) because I got asked to take a record when I went to site to repair network stuff, of which sites had a wheelchair-accessible entrance, accessible from the street.

o_O

All of them?

There's a door at the front and the back with a gentle ramp down to street level, flat access into the building, and the door is like twelve feet wide and fourteen feet high which is big enough for even the most impractically large wheelchair, surely?