How Chrome Accessibility Works | Hacker News Reader

How Chrome Accessibility Works

chromium.googlesource.com

59 pointslelandfe20 comments

Could you guys fix this accessibility bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=126072... - it's been open for years.

Slightly unrelated, but there's a whole industry on ADA compliance and randomly trying to sue people over it in the digital space (for website specifically.) Which seems like an issue that could -largely- be solved by the browsers themselves (animation pauses, contrast, font sizes, readable font switching, etc.) There's no telling how much companies spend on services like Accessible or Userway, etc. There's also a new industry on cookie & privacy compliance because of this too. I get privacy and ADA compliance, but some of this is just clearly written by the people making the tools. It's regulatory capture to the fullest extent. I found this out recently with a client wanting to pay through the nose to essentially have a whole separate company paid monthly to make sure the privacy policy and cookie policies meet various state laws. It's a bit ridiculous.

I'm not so sure that "solving" accessibility at the browser level would eliminate those kinds of lawsuits. It might be able to be argued that their "client" uses a different browser that doesn't include those accessibility features, and the website in question (that relies on the browsers fixing accessibility) isn't ADA compliant in that case.

I don't know how realistic the approach in general is but "This site only works in ${SpecificBrowser}" or "Your browser does not support ${'Standard'}" banner refusals have yet to result in a business getting sued for not displaying properly in an arbitrary browser that isn't supported.

I think the reason behind that is simple: In my experience, there are orders of magnitude more not-entirely-ADA-compliant websites than there are sites with banners such as the ones you mentioned.

But yeah, I don't know if the site-isn't-compliant-in-certain-browsers-equals-discrimination argument would succeed or not. But I bet the people whose income dries as a result of browser-based-compliance up would definitely try that tactic.

An order of magnitude difference should explain an order of magnitude difference, not a complete lack of a single example.

I disagree. If there are orders (orders with an 's', meaning more than one order) of magnitude more easy targets, why would any lawyer go after a rarer and harder target? That makes no logical/financial sense.

> but some of this is just clearly written by the people making the tools. It's regulatory capture to the fullest extent.

That doesn't seem particularly plausible. Almost all of the web accessibility standards predate these ADA lawsuits, as the first was in 2017. And much of it is just making use of existing desktop accessibility features, as this article points out.

I think you should look at the Bootlegs and Baptists aspect of this, because I think you're missing what I'm saying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

I work in the legal space and have worked around the Hill, this absolutely happens. State laws, etc have also become more stringent on certain things, which adds a new layer.

I understood the theory, but the dates don't seem to make sense. The cause can't come after the effect.

Accessibility engineer here.

If you talk to people in the accessibility space, most are all for the law firms going after companies who do not have accessible websites. This is mainly because literally everything has moved online. Your banks, your healthcare, your pharmacy, everything. If people with disabilities cannot access this, then you are denying them a real service, a service you have forced upon people because its saving money for your bottom line.

Having come from the legal industry myself, to me, this is the new ambulance chasing. Generally speaking the process is pretty simple. Find a site that has an accessibility flaw. Contact company and threaten lawsuit. Give company X amount of time to fix before lawsuit is filed. Sometimes they threaten lawsuits unless X amount is paid for extension.

Its borderline extortion because NY and CA now include anything digital in the ADA. This means a company can reside in BFE Kansas but some NYC law firm has a bot that catches a defect on their website and since jurisdiction is simply determined by the idea that if someone in CA or NY can access your site? Then its covered by the their new ADA rules.

Just this year alone, there has been a 200% increase in ADA lawsuits filed. Even worse? Let's say Target or Walmart get sued for a single ADA accessibility violation. They fix it, or have to pay some firm because they didn't fix it in time. That firm goes in, and finds another violation? Yeap, brand new lawsuit.

This is the new reality and any company who doesn't have a dedicated team of A11Y engineers working on this, already has a massive blind side. One that has started to really ramp up in the last three years. There are a handful of law firms that are actively scanning the web looking for accessibility widgets and other ways firms are cutting corners to try and make their sites appear to be accessible, when in reality, they are not and are now liable.

It seems like small multimodal LLMs have a killer use case to be bundled with browsers for accessibility. Eventually:

* if an image doesn’t have alt text

* you need to be read the page

* you need to be described what’s happening in a video

A model built into the OS or browser seems like a no-brainer.

Right now I use LLMs to generate alt text for images, and they are better than any I would have written by hand. Only in about 1% of cases do I need to correct anything.

Edge started doing this a few years ago: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2022/03/17/appears-to-sa...

Chrome already has optional built-in support for generating alt text for images. It's been there for years, using a server-based API.

It does seem possible that this could be replaced with a local model in the near future. It's not clear the average user has the hardware specs for this to be an option today, but it will increasingly be plausible.

Keep in mind, though, that alt text is just one small part of making a web site accessible.

> It does seem possible that this could be replaced with a local model in the near future. It's not clear the average user has the hardware specs for this to be an option today, but it will increasingly be plausible.

Siri does something like this when reading messages into your AirPods. It will give brief descriptions of photos sent in the message. I'm pretty sure it's all run locally.

Siri has the advantage of running on either an iPhone or a Macbook. Chrome has to run on budget android phones and chromebooks.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2024/05/experimenting-with-local-a...

> A model built into the OS or browser seems like a no-brainer.

How about localizing it into all languages supported by a major OS or browser?

LLM-generated descriptions miss lots of context. For instance, depending on the site and content, we might mention people's races or fashion. Other times we don't.

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