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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Has there ever been a benefit to all these new elements which are just divs with another name? Yes I know there was that aim to make the web entirely machine understandable but at this point it would be much easier to just use ML to view the page like a human than to convince every website maintainer to switch to specific elements.

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The accessibility proponent in me cries at your comment. The pragmatist accepts that it’s probably true.

Does accessibility technology do anything at all with <article>? I'd be very surprised if it did.

<section> once drove the model where we were going to kind of soft-kill the h1-h6 elements and have only h1s where their heading level depended on the section nesting level... but my understanding is that this didn't really work out and is functionally dead, and the current recommendations are all to just use the range of numbered headings as before.

Aside from a single h1-h6 tree, I could imagine separate semantic tags having more traction if they contained matching alt text, as with an image tag. A sidebar might have a single-sentence summary, etc. ... Just speculating here about where more value might be added.

I've always just dreamed of an entirely accessibility focused API that doesn't rely on the DOM and html elements. Most accessibility concerns are for visual impairment, so why do we still base it on what in practice is a visual model?

Do screen readers use a different user agent? Seems like a11y would be simpler in many cases by just delivering a text based result that's tailored to screen readers. Most of the issues seem to arise from the structure chosen in order to style things rather than the content itself.

Screen readers, and I think it can lead to more easily understood CSS, though a lot of people are using styled components etc now

Does a screen reader actually care about <article> vs. <section>? I think they just ignore those tags.

According to this article, atleast Apple's VoiceOver seem to use the html5 tags to parse a webpage differently: https://dev.to/satyakresna/html-semantics-in-web-accessibili...

I think waiting until screen readers adopt technological affordances to start using those affordances is putting the cart before the horse. One could ask why a screen-reader-tech maker would bother paying attention to tags no-one uses—might as well put as much semantic information out there as we can, and let different people consume it in the ways that make most sense for them.

It’s an impossible situation. We are expecting website owners and screen reader companies to come to some kind of consensus without ever collaborating or establishing a standards.

And just expecting that vaguely guessing what the other wants will work.

Firefox reader.

And probably some optimization on the engines to sort the fetching of the resources and painting the screen.

If they're used well, they could enable non-site-specific custom stylesheets. Imagine if you could view all sites with the same design instead of the author pushing theirs on you.

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