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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know much about this area of UI. Can you explain why this breaks accessibility? I did load it in reader mode (macOS Safari), and there were no paragraph breaks - is that similar to the experience of a screen reader?

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See this short section on semantic html: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/semantics#...

Screen readers know how to deal with common page elements. So they know how to announce and interact with page breaks, headers, lists, buttons, links etc.

If everything is a span, everything becomes just text.

It doesn't only apply to screen readers. Regular actions like keyboard navigation becomes broken. For example, on the page, you cannot tab between "click to expand" "buttons".

And so on and so on :)

In case someone happens to read my comment down here, I just want to highlight

> actions like keyboard navigation becomes broken

is also an accessibility issue. Not everyone can use a mouse. Keyboard navigation should be the easiest possible thing to test and ensure works…

Indeed. Good accessibility benefits everyone, even the non-disabled people. And that's even before we start the whole discussion on how everyone will be disabled at one point or another in their lives and so on :)

> Good accessibility benefits everyone, even the non-disabled people.

…until features start getting killed because they can’t be made to work well on screen readers. I’ve seen it happen and it strikes me as unfortunate.

Yeah, it' a sad state of things. Since there's no real money in screen readers, no one invests enough to make them better (e.g. to work with highly dynamic interfaces). Since they don't work in a lot of situations, people are disinclined to implement features that don't work well with screen readers. It's almost an impasse

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