Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

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As a person who daily drives a screen reader, I so agree with this.

We'd all be better off if the W3 dispensed with all that ideological semantic purity BS and started doing more realpolitik. Think not about whether your API is semantically pure, but about what developers want to do, what hacks they'll use to achieve their goals despite your objections, and how to enable doing those things in a way that is maximally beneficial to everyone involved.

ARIA live regions are the perfect example. What developers actually want is `document.speakText`. What developers actually have is a weird API that announces text on the page as it changes. They have to bridge from one to the other, which is difficult and hacky, even when implemented well. But hey, at least that live region approach is semantically pure HTML...

I don't want that. I don't want to care about screen readers (unfortunately I have to). I want a system where I can pick well-defined rules and then css can style it, screen readers will understand it, automations can parse it, keyboard navigation is free.

Obviously thats not what we got, but I feel like the set of established UI patterns is manageable enough that it could be built.

A great example is the new <select> styling that developers styled in all kinds of creative ways. Now give me that for comboboxes, trees, data-grids etc...

There are already well-defined rules, you just don't like some of the rules, e.g. you can't (today) style <select> options. Keyboard navigation is free as long as you follow the rules about which elements are focusable.

You shouldn't have to care about screen readers the same as you shouldn't have to care which browser someone uses but you always have to care about people; people who can't see or hear what you create, people who can operate a keyboard (or keyboard-equivalent) but not a mouse or touchscreen, people who can use a touchscreen but not a physical keyboard, etc.

Good news! `.ariaNotify()` is basically a real implementation of your hypothetical document.speakText.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ari...

Cool, waiting for browsers to pick it up nice and green

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