[eyelidlessness]

> Most of the heavy lifting in accessibility is in the ARIA attributes and being thoughtful about actually including those

This isn’t true. Semantic HTML is also very important, often more so.

> Unless you're doing SEO, everything semantic is just a distraction.

This is also not true. Besides actively harming accessibility (or making it substantially more difficult to improve), non-semantic HTML also breaks Reader Mode. And it can also add cognitive burden to maintenance and future feature work.

[pjc50]

Since reader mode is often "no annoying ads" mode, I'm wondering when sites are going to start breaking it on purpose.

[eyelidlessness]

From my understanding, this is part of why reader mode is not standardized or well documented. Its heuristics are definitely revised, likely in part to address this.

[plorkyeran]

Reader mode probably has a pretty low impact on ads. The full page is usually going to load before you activate reader mode, so the only ads it's actually hiding from you are ones below the fold, which are much lower value to begin with.

[extra88]

Not if you use Safari's feature to always load pages on a domain in Reader mode or add a Firefox extension that does the same.

Gizmodo articles should load in Reader mode but don't, I assume they're doing that intentionally.

[lolinder]

Yes, but at some point advertisers have to realize that people who use reader mode don't actually see the ads. The ads might load, but the user is just staring at the reader mode button waiting for it to turn on.