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

Speaking of WebAccessibilityFails, the article overflows to the left without a scrollbar when viewed on a phone narrower than an iPhone, making the first word of every line unreadable (and there are a lot of lines on a phone narrower than an iPhone).

The irony of a tool designed to enforce usability and discoverability that which itself is unusable and undiscoverable.

So what's the correction solution for something like this, and what's the desired voiceover?

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 explain, it should just be “use the <dialog> element.” - but the a11y tools are so inconsistent that you can’t just do the standards compliant thing. And don’t get me started on roving tabindex techniques (for things like data tables), which are at best an ugly hack that the entire industry has collectively decided “eh, it’s good enough”.

Even what's described in the article basically boils down to "You can label things, but not generic things (for some reason?), unless that generic thing is a <section> or has a popover attr in which case it magically works." And this isn't even one of the "hard" accessibility things!

Left part of the page is cut off and only accessible with reader mode on IronFox for Android. Talk about #WebAccessibilityFails

Two days ago, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248285 I commented on exactly this thing, a <dl aria-label=…> (dl has “no corresponding role”).

Zoom bug reading this article. Perhaps it's just my Firefox?

Still, a nice concise read if you can get it

today i learned there are browser built-in popovers now.

Ever since the EU has started to mandate web accessibility compliance - without defining what exactly needs to be done to be compliant, the only safe, lawyer-resistant way is to put aria-labels on absolutely everything.

It sucks, and arguably has the opposite effect, but this came from the same people who thought cookie banners were a good solution to anything, so ... what did we expect?

it's fine as long as you add an appropriate role

No one has done more damage to web accessibility than the web accessibility industry. Arcane rules like this make any sane developer throw up their hands in disgust.

I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.

why is this even a post - this is common sense not 'hacker news'

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.

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 disappear

  - it drops into the feature-limited mobile view

  - the author or framework overrides zoom with some other behavior — this one makes me especially crazy because they had to do *extra work* to screw up accessibility

Certain websites are impossible for me to use and I just avoid them.

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...

The most infuriating case I've seen within the last few days is the Airbnb CAPTCHA, which relies on the user being able to see content that is blocked at zoom levels over 100%. They have an alternative audio option that they've clearly never tested; it always reports failure, even if the CAPTCHA was solved correctly. Unthinkable for an organization with their resources.

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 disappear

  - it drops into the feature-limited mobile view

  - the author or framework overrides zoom with some other behavior — this one makes me especially crazy because they had to do *extra work* to screw up accessibility

Certain websites are impossible for me to use and I just avoid them.

I remember seeing a website that had <html style="font-size: XXX%"> 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.

> 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

Just tested, hn breaks if you zoom >110%.

The irony of a tool designed to enforce usability and discoverability that which itself is unusable and undiscoverable.

Left part of the page is cut off and only accessible with reader mode on IronFox for Android. Talk about #WebAccessibilityFails

It sucks, and arguably has the opposite effect, but this came from the same people who thought cookie banners were a good solution to anything, so ... what did we expect?

it's fine as long as you add an appropriate role

Two days ago, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248285 I commented on exactly this thing, a <dl aria-label=…> (dl has “no corresponding role”).

Zoom bug reading this article. Perhaps it's just my Firefox?

Still, a nice concise read if you can get it

why is this even a post - this is common sense not 'hacker news'

This is spot on. They are ripe for getting entirely wiped out by AI, and good riddance tbh.

My personal gripe is their refusal to support restarting heading levels within sections, causing whole classes of problems with CMS templating.

ARIA-AT is a W3C Community Group (of which I'm a member) trying to address this problem: https://aria-at.w3.org/about

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

So what's the correction solution for something like this, and what's the desired voiceover?

I was wondering that too. They explained the differences between the tools but didn't really qualify which was doing things "right" just that they differed.

today i learned there are browser built-in popovers now.

Those have been there for a bit, what is more recent is CSS anchor positioning which lets you position the popover near the item that triggered it. It’s all finally very nice!

No one has done more damage to web accessibility than the web accessibility industry. Arcane rules like this make any sane developer throw up their hands in disgust.

I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.

Support efforts for computer vision based browsers, MCP and APIs.

> I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.

I think there is truth in this. A lot of the assistive technology (AT) vendors, also sell consultancy.

Go to the Vispero career pages (who develop JAWS for Windows) and a big chunk of the jobs are remote consultancy roles advising clients on accessibility errors and selling for billable hours.

What makes a web page accessible? Why, it has to work with JAWS, of course!

Vispero makes a lot of money from this; the consultants are all in India, the clients are all in the West, so they can hoover up the difference. I get the impression most AT vendors are extremely cheap, which may explain why it takes decades for them to improve things

It's not really arcane, a div is meaningless because it's simply a container. If you want it to have meaning you can't just add a label. If I put the word "button" on a rock, it doesn't make it a button. That's the same story here.

Is this an arcane rule? "Don't label divs" and "aria-label is for when there's no content in the DOM that can be read" are pretty simple rules. Labels are ways to tell a screen reader about content it can't read, like an image or icon. Pretty straightforward.

It's way way simpler than, say, var hoisting in JavaScript.

> 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.

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.

What document?

Do you have any sources to back these claims up?

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.

The modern version is to use @media to achieve the same annoying effect without js. Fortunately, there's a finite number of rules so I've found that if you zoom far enough the text does actually start getting larger. Though I expect that someone's already figured out how to use CSS Math to keep text tiny at all zoom levels.

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.