If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

Just coming off a wild ride where a client was sued by a non-customer and a rapacious legal firm, who claimed that said client's website was not sufficiently accessible.

The day after the lawsuit was filed, a company specializing in accessibility testing mysteriously contacted the client, offering a solution. Client had not even gotten notice of the litigation yet.

The net result of this was several tens of thousands of dollars spent actually removing Aria tags and using standard modern HTML on their aging website, to barely meet some threshold that appeared to be compliant.

The company who did the "work", and I mean, it was barely any work, maybe 100 LoC, stands by it and says the client won't get sued again, as long as they pay for ongoing compliance testing. So it's all a fucking racket.

I pointed out to the client that I didn't think that this half-assed effort was remotely sufficient to actually improve accessibility, but they had an interesting response. Which was this:

In 3 years, all this compliance shit will be out the window, because AI screen readers and agents are going to make the whole point moot.

I can't really disagree with that.

> In 3 years, all this compliance shit will be out the window, because AI screen readers and agents are going to make the whole point moot.

Since the whole compliance racket is totally disconnected from actual accessibility outcomes, why would AI have any impact here?

There’s a standard and a law and money to be made.

There’s an interesting economic point to be made about the specialization of labor and the benefits that arise from that.

Just like it is more efficient to have a food system than to have everyone feed themselves from their backyard (if they have one), maybe someday people will realize that it will be more efficient to build things once and re-use.

Similarly, every argument for “AI makes it cheaper so we can do it now” falls apart under “AI also makes it cheaper to not do it”.

My understanding is Apple / Webkit is blocking custom element extension on native HTML elements, which would cut down this 500 line monster to:

class SaganButton extends HTMLButtonElement { … }

Anyone know the reasoning they’re blocking this?

Anything doing server-side work is going to have to be at least somewhat custom. The main problem is there isn't a standard "combobox" at all to speak of: we're still mostly stuck with the same carved-in-stone widget set from Mosaic, whereas native toolkits were more inventive even in the late 80s. Where's Athena's 2d panner widget, for example?

I didn't read any satire in the article at all, it just laid out all the built-in behaviors that a proper button has, and how much work it is to reimplement all of them. Something declarative and CSS-like would have been ideal for customizing elements, but instead we got the half-assed Custom Elements API and the completely different DX atrocity that is Web Components.

I can't really fault Custom Elements too much though, it's an imperfect API for an imperfect DOM and it's better than waiting forever for perfection. But I don't extend the same generosity to the Web Components spec.