[542458]

While web accessibility is important and something we should be investing in, I do feel that the vendors of accessibility tools are somewhat to blame here in how friggin difficult it is to actually make something accessible. Quirks and features are wildly inconsistent across tools, and feature uptake is much slower than it should be. For example, creating an accessible dialog shouldn’t be a multi-page essay to explain, it should just be “use the <dialog> element.” - but the a11y tools are so inconsistent that you can’t just do the standards compliant thing. And don’t get me started on roving tabindex techniques (for things like data tables), which are at best an ugly hack that the entire industry has collectively decided “eh, it’s good enough”.

Even what's described in the article basically boils down to "You can label things, but not generic things (for some reason?), unless that generic thing is a <section> or has a popover attr in which case it magically works." And this isn't even one of the "hard" accessibility things!

[karlshea]

This is spot on. They are ripe for getting entirely wiped out by AI, and good riddance tbh.

My personal gripe is their refusal to support restarting heading levels within sections, causing whole classes of problems with CMS templating.

[jugglinmike]

ARIA-AT is a W3C Community Group (of which I'm a member) trying to address this problem: https://aria-at.w3.org/about

[extra88]

I don't know what accessibility tools you're thinking of. If you mean assistive technology software like screen readers and voice control, yes, too often they fail to do what they should even when web standards are followed but at least as often the fault is with the web browsers (assuming the page code is all technically correct).

I'm not aware of any accessibility reasons to not simply use a <dialog> element for dialogs. For it to be a modal dialog, it must be opened using the `.showModal()` method or the invoker command `command="show-modal"`.

The hack of needing to implement roving tabindex techniques is not due to the failings of accessibility tools but because of web standards have not yet provided an alternative (adding the `focusgroup` attribute to the HTML standard is in the works).

[jbreckmckye]

Why would they want to improve their tools? In many cases (Vispero), they're the ones selling accessibility consultancy