The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

For some reason, font sizes have shot through the roof in the past few years. Medium is one of the biggest offenders. You get maybe 2-3 paragraphs per page now, when entire articles would fit on a single screen page with normal-sized fonts.

I'm in favor of this. My eyes aren't particularly bad, but I have to use reading glasses in order to read most computer text, and some can get really difficult. Larger fonts are better even for my bad-like-most-other-people-my-age eyes. The tiny text I would have found fine 20 years ago is painful now.

People started to listen to typographers. It's a good thing.

Reading this article made me realize what it is that's broken about the concept of semantic markup and why websites even today are div soup.

It's the same reason why divs won in the first place. You can't dictate the shape of a document to people and it be anything other than a kludge.

Take the site I work on, Great Big Story[1]. We have sections and headers, but our content isn't defined by text, it's defined by graphics and videos, with little metadata sections on the video player page that I suppose could be semantic if we had the right descriptive tags. I use semantic markup when it seems to make sense, but we have so many weird little needs to introduce elements just for styling purposes.

Take a recent example, I need four elements to make a styled file input form. Two labels, one to look like a button and can be clicked, taking advantage of the browser behavior of treating clicks on the label to be clicks on the form. The other label is the actual label, could be just a span if I wanted, it doesn't have the htmlFor attribute set. The actual form input button is hidden using CSS tricks because the actual button can't be styled. Finally there's the filename display, which is set to the filename of whatever was uploaded or the existing one if present. This uses Javascript callbacks to get set.

None of these elements are semantic, legacy cruft keeps the markup from being simple and readable. I suppose you could demand our video presentation site to be a motherfucking website[2], but I fail to see how that will actually improve much of anything and would just hurt our brand. I'm getting a little tired of coder hatred for web fashion. It keeps us all employed.

But I think we're at least 10 years out from being able to actually use semantic markup. Web standards and browser vendors still have some maturing to do.

[1] https://www.greatbigstory.com

[2] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Except sadly not anymore, even if you pay: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003053487-Custo...