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Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

matuzo.at

41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#41
post #7

Avoid aria tags. The spec is unworkable (see this document) the browsers made by the disability industry extract vast quantities of money from disabled people with little effectiveness because they try and boil the ocean which unsurprisingly is ineffective. Support efforts for computer vision based browsers, MCP and APIs.

To hell with using vision based AI for web accessibility. it really isn't that hard to get right. Semantic html is already accessible. ARIA can help when devs want to use the wrong elements for some reason or for custom controls.

> it really isn't that hard to get right.

Yes you just need every website to use it, rather than fixing the client. Which is the 'boil the ocean' strategy mentioned in the comment you're replying to.

> ARIA can help when devs want to use the wrong elements for some reason or for custom controls.

But it can't. See this article.

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#42
post #8
post #7

Avoid aria tags. The spec is unworkable (see this document) the browsers made by the disability industry extract vast quantities of money from disabled people with little effectiveness because they try and boil the ocean which unsurprisingly is ineffective. Support efforts for computer vision based browsers, MCP and APIs.

What document? Do you have any sources to back these claims up?

> What document?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237159

> Do you have any sources to back these claims up?

Yes, asides from the article, check the prices of browsers from the disability industry and consider for yourself whether it's logically easier to fix every website or make a client that can adapt existing webpages.

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#43
post #6

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 explai…

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

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#44
post #14
post #7

Avoid aria tags. The spec is unworkable (see this document) the browsers made by the disability industry extract vast quantities of money from disabled people with little effectiveness because they try and boil the ocean which unsurprisingly is ineffective. Support efforts for computer vision based browsers, MCP and APIs.

> MCP Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility. Just make the damn page accessible already. Actually, more like make sure you don't break the accessibility that's there by default with correctly written plain HTML.

> Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility.

Why? It's the right tool for the job.

> Just make the damn page accessible already.

Oh so just modify every website and expect the disabled people to wait while this happens?

This disabled web browser industry doesn't care about disabled people. Their solutions don't work, disabled browsers are expensive because government grants are given to purchase them.

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#45
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is caused by using CSS grid with "minmax(auto, 57rem)" and an overflowing table. It can be fixed with adding "safe" to "justify-content: safe center" that is defined on main. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

Funny how the problem itself is created by CSS, and the solution is "more CSS." On the other hand, bare HTML tends to be extremely accessible and lacks these kinds of basic problems with panning, zooming, and scrolling.

CSS is this weird thing where it has dominance as a layout engine because it is so battle tested compared to a lot of other layout engines, but was clearly designed by a committee that could give a rat’s ass about how ergonomic it is to use.

It took until 2023 to support nesting, something that was so obvious that preprocessors have had it since at least 2006.

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#46
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep my browser zoomed in substantially to compensate for uncorrectable vision issues. I’d say perhaps once per day I’ll encounter a website that has never had zoom in/out (ctl +/-) tested because if you zoom up even one level from 100%, everything breaks. There are several equally useless failure modes I’ve seen with this, a few off the top of my head: - rendering fails, everything falls apart - some elements disa…

I remember seeing a website that had for the top-level element, and had JS that would dynamically recalculate that percentage on every resize event to keep the visual font size almost (exactly) constant. Made me think for a moment that my mouse wheel broke.

One of my pet peeves in the modern web is when someone displays an image and scales it to exactly the size of your screen, but I want to look more closely at a part of the image so I do a scrollwheel zoom, only for the image to actually shrink as every UI element except the thing I want gets bigger. And then you go "ok, right click on the image and do the "Open Image in new tab" thing and somehow the site defeats that and puts all of their UI crap in the new tab as well.

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#47
post #44
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MCP Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility. Just make the damn page accessible already. Actually, more like make sure you don't break the accessibility that's there by default with correctly written plain HTML.

> Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility. Why? It's the right tool for the job. > Just make the damn page accessible already. Oh so just modify every website and expect the disabled people to wait while this happens? This disabled web browser industry doesn't care about disabled people. Their solutions don't work, disabled browsers are expensive because government grants are given to purchase th…

> Why? It's the right tool for the job.

No, it's not. Why should disabled users be forced to indirectly interact with a webpage via a non-deterministic agent, rather than directly interact with one that's specifically designed to accommodate them?

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#48
post #44
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MCP Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility. Just make the damn page accessible already. Actually, more like make sure you don't break the accessibility that's there by default with correctly written plain HTML.

> Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility. Why? It's the right tool for the job. > Just make the damn page accessible already. Oh so just modify every website and expect the disabled people to wait while this happens? This disabled web browser industry doesn't care about disabled people. Their solutions don't work, disabled browsers are expensive because government grants are given to purchase th…

For a user running into broken pages, sure, you have to compose with what you have.

As a developer, however, get your shit fixed! And that fixing doesn't involve any MCP. Don't expect visitors to run AI...

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#49
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Respectfully screw making users rely on AI for accessibility. Why? It's the right tool for the job. > Just make the damn page accessible already. Oh so just modify every website and expect the disabled people to wait while this happens? This disabled web browser industry doesn't care about disabled people. Their solutions don't work, disabled browsers are expensive because government grants are given to purchase th…

> Why? It's the right tool for the job. No, it's not. Why should disabled users be forced to indirectly interact with a webpage via a non-deterministic agent, rather than directly interact with one that's specifically designed to accommodate them?

> rather than directly interact with one that's specifically designed to accommodate them?

Because a world where that happens consistently doesn't exist, it hasn't existed for the last 20 years we've been using ARIA tags, and won't ever exist.

Re: Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

#50
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To hell with using vision based AI for web accessibility. it really isn't that hard to get right. Semantic html is already accessible. ARIA can help when devs want to use the wrong elements for some reason or for custom controls.

> it really isn't that hard to get right. Yes you just need every website to use it, rather than fixing the client. Which is the 'boil the ocean' strategy mentioned in the comment you're replying to. > ARIA can help when devs want to use the wrong elements for some reason or for custom controls. But it can't. See this article.

See https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ for a guide on how to create accessible markup for custom controls and the associated examples.

See specifically https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/practices/names-and-descript... for details on naming. That has extensive notes and details for labeling elements correctly.

See https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/components/ for bootstrap markup on creating accessible components.

There are plenty of other resources.

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