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Very nice article, but I'd say that this horse has left the barn a long time ago. "Responsive" web technologies in general make it so that the website owner can discover things about the client that they arguably shouldn't be able to. This new Apple feature is merely extending that well-established pattern and including accessibility technology as part of it.

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As a blind user I don't want an easy way for websites or add tracking code to know if I'm using a screen reader. If this feature has to exist then it should be a site by site option that is disabled by default. I can then make the choice to determine if I want a site to know I'm using a screen reader based on the reasoning the site is asking. A blog does not need to know if I'm using a screen reader while a single page app may. I would argue that if a site has screen reader specific code they are doing things wrong but at least having to manually enable the option on a specific site would allow me to decide if the downsides of the site knowing I am blind are worth the reasoning they ask me to enable it.

Actually we can build responsive web sites by sending to everybody the same HTML and CSS. Then the browser decides how to display the page given the media queries and the window size.

What a browser usually does is getting the images with the appropriate resolution, so the web server can infer something about the user setup Eben with JavaScript disabled.

However a web service tracks only what it decides to track and it can provide a responsive experience without tracking anything.

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