WebAssembly Studio

Since somehow we're still talking about how to do it I'd simply do "all: unset" if I don't care about IE and want to fully control the style. In that way the defaults go out the window and I can build up to the style I want.

If you don't do this approach you're going to want to keep in mind differences in default whitespace handling and alignment/sizing model defaults which are going to be different in a button vs a typical container.

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Nothing wrong with going into a technical comment or discussion in hopes of sharing knowledge but that's not what was being talked about here. Look how long you and I have been talking about a single button in the UI. Look how many other comments there are about this. Now go back to the original comment "It breaks my heart that when this project was started in 2017, some 20 years after web accessibility advocacy had started in earnest, the developer was still uninformed enough about accessibility that they would create a custom button component with no ARIA support.". Ignoring that it's talking about a COMPLETELY different approach to making the button accessible the assumption is the developer is uninformed about accessibility. My argument is knowledgeable or not it's a lot of work for a passion project and not something reasonable to expect be done in one. If you want to make a PR to add user accessibility so they can understand that's great but I think you'll find it was a lot more work than figuring out how to make this one button be marked for a screen reader. You may also (likely) find they knew many of the things that would be needed to make it accessible but went with what was quick and easy for the passion project, especially considering the thing is still marked beta.

Taking that to the other part of your content no it's not alright for you to decide what's acceptable code quality for someone else to be able to share their free project. It'd be nice if it was accessible to the blind, it'd also be nice to have Chinese and Indian translations. None of these is something reasonable to expect from a project like this simply because it was shared for free. A government project definitely. A commercial project very much so. Some person's passion project? No, you don't get to decide when it's usable by enough people for them to share it with others. And you shouldn't expect open source developers to do anything for you, always be happy they picked something up they didn't want/need themselves. Otherwise do the work or pay them to, don't just demand they follow your standards. This is very different than making a helpful PR or comment about how to do it which is on the "totally acceptable" side of the fence.

I'm not here to shame anybody but if I was it'd be people that see an free and open source project and the first thing they think is to comment to shame the author about it.

> the assumption is the developer is uninformed about accessibility.

The assumption that the developer is uninformed about accessibility is the kind assumption, not the mean one. The alternative implication, that they knew about accessibility but chose to use inaccessible markup instead, is a much worse reading of the situation.

The kind reading of this comment is that 20 years after we started having this conversation, we still have failed to educate developers on how to use a button. That is something that's valid to be sad about, it reflects nothing on the developer in question. It's a failure of web education.

> None of these is something reasonable to expect from a project like this simply because it was shared for free.

There's a fundamental difference here between us then. I'm not shaming the developer, I'm not mad that they didn't know in advance how to be accessible. I'm not mad that they released a project early without thinking about accessibility. But I am completely unapologetic about the idea that most developers on the web should be thinking about accessibility, and that it is reasonable to mention accessibility on public projects submitted into public spaces.

The web as a platform and a community cares about accessibility. So if you come onto the web and start making stuff, we will look at the accessibility and we will comment on it. We do that because, from the perspective of accessibility advocates, there are three options:

1. The technology gets restricted in some way so that you're forced to be accessible (maybe click handlers can't be attached to divs or something).

2. The law steps in and requires that anything beyond a hobby project be accessible, and we just kind of accept that blind people are excluded from the hobby web (not really acceptable to us).

3. We educate people and promote a value system that encourages developers to care about accessibility when possible.

We prefer the third option.

I want to encourage people to think that very basic accessibility accommodations are the standard normal thing that developers should think about. In my mind, this is the kinder option, because the alternative is stricter laws and more restrictive technology and frameworks that make it harder to do creative things.

Of course people can release whatever they want whenever they want. Of course, people can show off public projects that are unfinished or that have problems. Of course nobody can require anyone to release anything for free. But similarly, of course people in the public can point out that those projects aren't fitting into the web ethos. The only way we are going to make progress on accessibility in the web is by encouraging a culture of people who care about accessibility.

The tech changes can only go so far. We can make HTML more semantic, but we can't auto-caption images. At some point, people have to be convinced that this is worth caring about. Open Source does not mean we need to throw away any values about what good software should look like. We can be grateful that the author made a cool IDE while still openly acknowledging that it doesn't in its current state conform to shared web values.

There are plenty of counterexamples.

For example, the date input control does not allow to enforce date format by design, and the auto-detection of user facing format is buggy and inconsistent across browsers on the same system (e.g. Edge legacy ignored Windows' region preference and used the keyboard locale). It tends to show the American-style dates even on non-American locales, making the control not just useless but sometimes actively misleading.

Even apart from that it's pretty basic. Keyboard navigation is bad everywhere bad but in Chrome where it's just mediocre - there's no inline/auto-popup mode like other js pickers, and it requires nonintuitively pressing ENTER to pop-up.

Some browsers like Firefox don't have a 'Today' button, and even in Chrome you can't hide it when it doesn't make sense. No browser has a 'Clear' button which makes sense in some scenarios.

I can go on and on about how flawed that control is, but this is long enough.

If you are designing a custom control framework from scratch, supporting accessibility properly is not trivial, and the amount of new users it would bring you pales in comparison with almost any use case-focused feature. So it makes sense that the author would not be willing to implement it.

I also don't like the current approach of arbitrarily targeting small vendors and shaming them into putting unpaid time into a feature that will not pay off for them. It surely gives you the sense of power and moral superiority, but it is extremely toxic and demotivating to small vendors.

I think, a better alternative for people concerned about accessibility would be to offer free help adding accessibility to the products they are concerned about. I am certain, had you approached the author with a ready-to-use pull request instead of calling them ignorant, they would have thanked you and merged your changes into the code base ASAP.