[gampleman]

Is this really true? Messaging like this will cause a lot of developers to just give up. Most places I've worked at did accessibility at best as a best effort sort of thing. After reading this, there will be no attempts made to improve the state of affairs.

Perhaps that will be an improvement? I don't know.

[robin_reala]

Let’s give a concrete and catastrophic example of something I’ve seen in the wild in a professional product. A developer there had obviously seen the application role[1] in the ARIA specs, thought “I’m building a web app”, and added it to their html element.

What role="application" means to assistive tech is: “I’m building a really complex application, so I’m going to handle absolutely everything for you, I don’t want you to have any default behaviour.” This meant that the web app in question was 100% unusable for any people using assistive technology, as that was broadly as far as they’d got with accessibility support.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

[gampleman]

That does seem catastrophically misguided. I’m more curious about the more common case where tags are used as documented (and I really wish the documentation was better), but perhaps not completely. For instance we have a Finder like UI in our web app that conceptually is a treegrid, but we don’t support all of the keyboard interactions advised at the above website.

Should we remove the role attributes?

[tdeck]

Stories like this make me wonder if we could build a Chrome extension with a collection of crowd-sourced site-specific accessibility tweaks. Things like removing that bad ARIA tag or bodging in proper labels or tabindexes. It wouldn't be perfect, but neither is AdBlock and it offers a lot of benefit.

[austin-cheney]

ARIA is often a compensating technology more than a primary solution. I try to not use ARIA in my own code aside from the role attribute. I instead rely on the clear navigation and order HTML content and events as my primary solutions.

[no_wizard]

Using the right elements (like button instead of a div) will take you very, very, very fair with little to no additional work.

[askew]

The statement is about encouraging folks to use the platform: `<button>Hello!</button>` over `<div role=button tabindex=0>Hello</div>`

[nabla9]

It is true. This is not messaging. They are not selling you ARIA.

If you are developer, just write semantically clear HTML instead. Just doing something is worse than doing nothing in accessibility.

[pickpuck]

This adage has been "the first rule of ARIA" since the beginning.

There are a few ARIA "widgets" that have no HTML equivalent, such as Tabs or a spreadsheet-like Grid. Those are heavily documented so you can basically copy and paste whenever you need them.

Avoiding sprinkling ARIA on already-semantic HTML, because this can lead to confusing or inconsistent behaviors for the end user.