No ARIA is better than bad ARIA

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.

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).

+1, or simply hire a blind person to run one or more stages of QC on your application.

Adjacently, I cannot state enough how much I wish other toolkits would offer component libraries as cohesive as MUI is for React... the use of Aria is "just right" IMO and is far more broad, complete and cohesive as a whole (aside from some poor default color/contrast choices in Material defaults inherited from Google).

Another thing that bugs me to no end, since I've developed some visual impairments, is sites/apps that don't function on mobile devices with text/display scaling cranked up. Modals where the buttons are off-screen and no way to scroll to them are useless, similarly allowing text to go too big (gmail) to where an 8-letter word gets split and wrapped.

All around, I definitely think that if you're spending 8+ figures on application developers you can afford testing by a few people who are visually impaired and blind.

Earlier in my career, I sat with a blind user through testing a bunch of eLearning content and it was really eye opening back then... the establishment of aria labels helps a lot... but as the article mentions, you need to use them right. I find that more often than not, using the right elements/components, labels, titles, etc in the first place goes a long way.

yeah but at least sit next to the blind person, I've heard so many people talk about aria tags (myself included) without actually trying it once themselves or at least seeing a video how impaired people actually use it.