Hacker News Reader

Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

Everyone needs to read this spec and then live and breathe its tenets … sure. This reminds me of the time when we fixed the footguns with C by making everyone into better developers.

That guy is asking you if replacing a part of the html with some other html alerts screen readers to the change.

It’s a reasonable question and you could share what you know about how screen readers react when this replacement happens. You could write some documentation on how to alert them, some best practices to follow.

Instead you say read the fucking manual, as if that helps. You put on a veneer of caring for accessibility but it seems you care about the “purity” of htmx more.

View on HN

Agreed.

Frontend frameworks often do spend a lot of time thinking about the accessibility concerns associated with client side routing, so it's not absurd to consider this question in scope for a frontend library that handles DOM updates.

See for instance this 2019 study by Gatsby: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/blog/2019-07-11-user-testing-access...

Or even the modern Next docs on route announcements: https://nextjs.org/docs/architecture/accessibility#route-ann...

Some of this will have to be bespoke work done on a per-site basis, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea of completely punting this responsibility to developers using htmx, even if it does make philosophical sense to say "this is scope creep", because ultimately users with disabilities will end up being the ones whose experience on the web is sacrificed on this altar of ideological purity.

> That guy is asking you if replacing a part of the html with some other html alerts screen readers to the change....It’s a reasonable question

Of course it is, but it's like asking if using React.js will prevent SQL injection attacks. They are orthogonal things. Making screen readers announce things is controlled by the HTML you write, not by htmx.

You're wrong, and in a pretty obvious way.

It's actually like asking what a database library will do to prevent SQL injection attacks. And the answer is simple - "don't do string interpolation yourself, instead use the `(?, ?)` syntax". If you use that the SQL escaping will be taken care of automatically by the library. If the database library said something idiotic like "read the spec and implement your own SQL escaping logic" it would be a dereliction of duty.

Make no mistake, a frontend library like htmx has a responsibility to not break the front end from an accessibility perspective. If existing screenreaders break when you replace HTML then the htmx approach is broken and htmx needs to address that.

Conceptually htmx is closer to Fetch API + set innerHTML than it is to a 'frontend library' like React.js. Do people complain that setting innerHTML from JavaScript breaks screen readers? Of course not, they set up aria-live regions correctly as shown in plenty of accessibility documentation. htmx can't make the decision for you what your aria-live regions are and what text should be read out when the content changes, you need to decide that yourself.

EDIT: here's the one mention of `aria-live` in the React.js codebase defining it as a valid ARIA attribute for ReactDOM: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Afacebook%2Freact%20%22ari...

The one mention in Vuejs core to define its accepted values: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Avuejs%2Fcore%20%22aria-li...

The one mention in the Svelte runtime defining its accepted values: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Asveltejs%2Fsvelte%20%22ar...

Do people go after these frameworks saying they need to handle breaking screenreaders by dynamically updating content? Of course not. Setting live regions is the responsibility of the web page creator, not the framework.

Yes, I do go after those frameworks saying they need to at the very least help their users understand what they should do. I'm disappointed by any JavaScript library or framework that doesn't provide good documented examples for this, which is almost all of them.

> Yes, I do go after those frameworks

I'll believe that once I see you file an issue which mentions accessibility against any of the projects I linked to ;-)

https://github.com/facebook/react/issues?q=is%3Aissue+author...

https://github.com/vuejs/core/issues?q=is%3Aissue+author%3As...

https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues?q=is%3Aissue+autho...

Simon don’t waste your time with this guy. I thought he was affiliated with htmx but he’s just some jerk off trying to prove he’s “right”.

I encourage you to read the guidelines and familiarize yourself with what is acceptable in HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right, thanks for the reminder.

Simon don’t waste your time with this guy. I thought he was affiliated with htmx but he’s just some dude trying to prove he’s “right”.

Being affiliated with htmx or not doesn't change basic facts about web accessibility :-D Go look at the links I posted, look for the issues people filed against the repos claiming that their dynamic content updates break screen readers. There are zero. People understand how web accessibility works and what responsibilities lie at which parts of their stack.

Now if you say that component frameworks like shadcn/ui or whatnot should implement accessible behaviours and patterns, I am 100% with you on that. But React/Vue/htmx are at a lower level, they can't decide those things for you.

EDIT: sure enough, someone filed an issue with shadcn/ui that it does not announce something properly in screenreaders: https://github.com/shadcn-ui/ui/issues/4209

Reply on news.ycombinator.com