[danShumway]

Usually when people say something would be a simple change, they're not aware of the underlying complexity.

This is a different case -- HN genuinely does not have a complicated UI, and it genuinely would not be difficult to make a UI that worked better with screen readers. It would not be difficult to rebuild a HN UI to stop using tables without even making any visual changes to what the site looks like.

There is very little complicated functionality going on in HN pages. They're paginated, they don't have a ton of content, they don't have a lot of complicated UI controls they need to support. They're mostly static pages with some very minor form controls.

In this specific case, there really is no excuse for HN to be screenreader inaccessible. This would not be a complicated conversion for even a single experienced web developer. You wouldn't need to use React, you wouldn't need to use any 3rd-party library or dependency at all. You wouldn't need complicated CSS features, you wouldn't need to redesign the UI.

Honestly in a lot of ways, the current HN table layout is more complicated than it needs to be, the generated HTML could be a lot simpler. Really, there's a difference between being "retro" and using what works instead of chasing modern trends, and having outputted HTML that's broken and hacky, and was broken and hacky even at the time it was released. HN is very solidly in the latter category.