Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs

I wish I could agree with you, but in my experience the built-in controls have many flaws and have remained stagnant for years or decades.

I dont remember last time (if ever?) I saw a native date input in the wild.

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It's worse than that. Accessibility is actually opposite to what the business wants, and the combined cultural and (occasionally) legal backing it has is our last line of defense of user autonomy.

Assistive software is just a different user agent. A non-standard browser interpreting the page in ways different than the vendor intended. The very same feature that enables a screen reader to help a blind person navigate, enables everyone else to identify and snip off ads and upsells, escape the thick sewage that's called "web design", and get straight to the actual thing one came for in the first place. Accessibility is the only thing that prevents the web from becoming Flash again, entirely unparseable through automated means[0].

Again, were it not for cultural and legal insistence to cater for the disabled, we'd all already be completely without agency on the web, dumb riders in a theme park paying for something at every turn. Cutting curbs and such? Why, so the users complete their "journey" faster and leave less money behind?

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[0] - LLMs changed the equation here recently, mostly in our favor, for now. In the immediate term, they can make any website machine-interpretable no matter what the vendor does. But that's just the beginning, we don't yet know how vendors will abuse GenAI to thwart the users.

>> it makes me so sad when I hear people say "it's just not worth it".

Companies are going to find out the hard way then. I work for a large corporation and we've had a consistent stream of companies and individuals contacting us about accessibility with several of our apps and sites.

This means more time to fix or completely redo these because they built them with accessibility issues baked into them and now we're tasked with fixing them or else deal with the legal ramifications.

Now that several states have included anything online or digital in the ADA, that means we now have a handful of law firms in CA and NY that are filing accessibility lawsuits. Just in 2024 there were over 4,000 lawsuits filed, the majority of them at the state level. The old adage that companies were taking a risk by not having their online apps and sites being accessible is a very real threat now.

I feel like the trend is finally starting to turn and companies are taking accessibility a lot more seriously now.

I completely agree, as someone who is disabled and needs to use assistive technology every day. Honestly, I feel like this is a bipartite problem:

1. Companies and individuals don't think about accessibility when designing software. It's from my experience always something that's bolted on after the fact (which only makes adding it in an order of magnitude more difficult). There are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare.

2. Our education system doesn't teach people about this, in practically any capacity, unless you, e.g., go into the education system specifically to work with individuals with disabilities. But if your just an ordinary student taking the usual course classes, it's never mentioned, not even in passing. Or at least, it wasn't mentioned at all in passing when I was in school, unless the teacher brought it up as more of an aside, and even then there wasn't a dedicated class on it.

Granted, the second part is more of a "developer" problem, but people not knowing about individuals with disabilities at all, or what they're capable of if you give them the tools/skills, etc., is also a massive problem. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy to educate when people get curious and ask, and I actively encourage it. But I shouldn't have to. This is something our school system should be teaching people about. An accessible world is better for everyone in pretty much every way.

To offer a bit of hope, both the quality and amount of information available nowadays regarding accessibility is at an all-time high.

I remember comments from people who would downplay the difficulty of getting accessibility right despite the changing landscape of web development. Part of it was that web standards hadn't fully caught up in capabilities. But another part of it was just that there wasn't that much conscious effort from the open source community to treat accessibility as a priority.

Right now you can find really high quality packages with any kind of widget without sacrificing accessibility.

I agree 100% and welcome any improvement for any reason.

When most or all of us benefit from "accessibility", then it isn't really accessibility. It is fixing a broken UI, period. Designers need to be shamed for not even providing a good enough UI for the average person, let alone disabled people.

Now, imagine how the world feels from my perspective (100% blind). In my 20s, I was enthusiastic. Joined Debian to found the Debian Accessibility Project. Did a lot of packaging of obscure assistive technology software. Submitted a11y bugs (and actually got them fixed) to major products like Eclipse and Qt. Felt like I could really make at least a small difference. Then, time passed, and experience accumulated. I learnt that only an infinitesimal fraction of contributors is actually motivated/willing to help with niche areas like Accessibility. I learnt that the "scratch your own itch" attitude of FLOSS is a reason why Accessibility doesn't happen. Then, GNOME3 came about, and all my remaining motivation/naivety evaporated sudenly. IBM and Sun had already stopped their Accessibility efforts late 2008. And the CORBA->DBus move basically set accessibility efforts back a few years. I was devastated, and also learnt a lot of things. After that, web accessibility started to get worse and worse. These days, most of the modern web is inaccessible to people like me, only a handful of selected applications/sites do work, and the coridor is progressively getting more narrow. I know stories of 40+yo blind people loosing their jobs due to IT restructuring at their company, left and right. The digital divide is here, and nobody is really talking about it anymore, because, frankly, those "in the know" have basically given up. Its a sad story. Capitalism is simply not willing to care for small minorities. Its a fact... which took me over 20 years to fully accept.

These are great and humanistic sentiments, until you have to talk price. When price comes into the equation, the approach of specialized accessibility software seems to work much better in a lot of cases.

Consider a rosy hypothetical: A SaaS under truly great, enlightened leadership. The team lead knows that it would take only one two week sprint, for one focused developer, to go the last mile and make it truly accessible for all. The fully loaded cost of those developer-hours, in a very optimistic scenario, is $1000, and optically closer to $4-8000 for a US based team.

First, do those extra steps towards accessibility even break even? Second, if so, are they truly the revenue maximizing move for what that dev can do with that 2-week sprint? Sometimes, rarely, they are. In practice I suspect market research would show the opposite. This is before we add in all of the usual fog of war around how long things really take to build, whether the leadership is really as enlightened as they seem, etc.

Consider an alternative model where one company specializes in creating high quality accessibility-enhancing software. This software aims to work as a compatibility layer across most to all of the other programs a user is likely to use; perhaps they use frequent in-memory screenshots and detailed image analysis to help blind users understand what's going on. Or perhaps it's as simple as a FOSS dev focusing on making sure every terminal program they can run works well with their screen reader.

There are a plethora of benefits to this model, not least that you aren't imposing a heavy tax on everyone else for a really small customer base. This is also very specialized, customer-facing work. If there is anywhere in software you would want dedicated frontend or UI/UX expertise it would probably be the guy designing the screen reader compatibility layer.

I point to the popular extension Dark Reader as an example of this paradigm; it does a wonderful job on most websites, is easy to disable on websites where it doesn't, and doesn't cost the website runner anything to use.

Some might take issue with this for aesthetic reasons. It feels kludgy to suggest someone run a whole third interface layer just to use the same software you and I use right out of the box. I think this aesthetic violation is misplaced in this case - the factors at play suggest to me that this work would benefit heavily from specialization. Indeed, that seems to be what has happened in practice; making the web accessible in 2025 is much easier than it was in 2000, because third parties have stepped up and improved the situation dramatically enough that hooking into accessibility layers "merely" requires things like writing semantically correct HTML.

Now imagine if a Dark Reader existed, that could reliably insert all the finer details into the page which are obvious from a screen grab of the page, but non-obvious to the web designer - that would clearly be a much better approach for the majority of businesses.

> We all benefit from digital (and physical) accessibility.

If only. The problem is that businesses on the web directly benefit from things being not accessible.

Attention economy makes money on friction. Your typical website is a maze the user is supposed to get a little lost in, to maximize time they're exposed to product offering, and/or third-party ads, and/or tracking. Cutting curbs just tells them where to go and lets them do it with less effort, so they cut through the maze faster, and business loses money.

The curb cut is not even that good, the new hotness are elevated crosswalks. Smooth paving also makes a big diffeerence. My wife is on a wheelchair and it's hard to overstate how much these little things improve her life.

> We all benefit from digital (and physical) accessibility

Interestingly though, in this space, wheelchair accessible sidewalks often conflict with tactile paving (for blind people). Those tactile bumps are often inside the curbs, so there's often no way for a wheelchair to avoid them.

Given the morass of JS slathered on every site these days, selector performance is the least of your worries.

Well, in the context of this article, it still consists of meaningful semantic elements, and attributes like `aria-selected`. And if I really need to, I can still just add a regular class.

I've felt this way for years, even wrote a blog post [1] about it nearly 2 years ago

It doesn't seem to be getting better, sadly. You get posts like the op, where the author realizes there's something wrong with how they're doing things, but then misses that tailwind is a big part of it. Emperor has no clothes, so everyone else strips naked as well

1: https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...

> discouraging you from using semantically-meaningful classes, and duplicating stuff enormously rather than using sane selectors

In any big site "semantically meaningful classes" are a similar mess, and the duplication is both enormous and spread out and suffers from accidental cascades.

Your URL seems to have expired.

In any case it is "Document 32019L0882" which does go into effect on June 28:

> Directive (EU) 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on the accessibility requirements for products and services (Text with EEA relevance)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/882/oj/eng (I think this one is permanent)

It might be that there is no built-in functionality for some things in pure HTML. But most of the time, standard HTML tags provide all the functionality you need, even for web applications. And this benefits people with disabilities.

The problem is, a LOT of people are treating documents as if they are apps.

You missed the point entirely.

You should still use appropriate tags like a, button, label, input and not div, div, div, div. Even apps have links