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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.

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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.

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