What does this have to with TFA? This is about accessibility, it has nothing to do with React (or any one web framework).

This is a very popular take, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the article.

>> it makes me so sad when I hear people say "it's just not worth it".

Companies are going to find out the hard way then. I work for a large corporation and we've had a consistent stream of companies and individuals contacting us about accessibility with several of our apps and sites.

This means more time to fix or completely redo these because they built them with accessibility issues baked into them and now we're tasked with fixing them or else deal with the legal ramifications.

Now that several states have included anything online or digital in the ADA, that means we now have a handful of law firms in CA and NY that are filing accessibility lawsuits. Just in 2024 there were over 4,000 lawsuits filed, the majority of them at the state level. The old adage that companies were taking a risk by not having their online apps and sites being accessible is a very real threat now.

I feel like the trend is finally starting to turn and companies are taking accessibility a lot more seriously now.

To offer a bit of hope, both the quality and amount of information available nowadays regarding accessibility is at an all-time high.

I remember comments from people who would downplay the difficulty of getting accessibility right despite the changing landscape of web development. Part of it was that web standards hadn't fully caught up in capabilities. But another part of it was just that there wasn't that much conscious effort from the open source community to treat accessibility as a priority.

Right now you can find really high quality packages with any kind of widget without sacrificing accessibility.

I completely agree, as someone who is disabled and needs to use assistive technology every day. Honestly, I feel like this is a bipartite problem:

1. Companies and individuals don't think about accessibility when designing software. It's from my experience always something that's bolted on after the fact (which only makes adding it in an order of magnitude more difficult). There are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare.

2. Our education system doesn't teach people about this, in practically any capacity, unless you, e.g., go into the education system specifically to work with individuals with disabilities. But if your just an ordinary student taking the usual course classes, it's never mentioned, not even in passing. Or at least, it wasn't mentioned at all in passing when I was in school, unless the teacher brought it up as more of an aside, and even then there wasn't a dedicated class on it.

Granted, the second part is more of a "developer" problem, but people not knowing about individuals with disabilities at all, or what they're capable of if you give them the tools/skills, etc., is also a massive problem. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy to educate when people get curious and ask, and I actively encourage it. But I shouldn't have to. This is something our school system should be teaching people about. An accessible world is better for everyone in pretty much every way.

Now, imagine how the world feels from my perspective (100% blind). In my 20s, I was enthusiastic. Joined Debian to found the Debian Accessibility Project. Did a lot of packaging of obscure assistive technology software. Submitted a11y bugs (and actually got them fixed) to major products like Eclipse and Qt. Felt like I could really make at least a small difference. Then, time passed, and experience accumulated. I learnt that only an infinitesimal fraction of contributors is actually motivated/willing to help with niche areas like Accessibility. I learnt that the "scratch your own itch" attitude of FLOSS is a reason why Accessibility doesn't happen. Then, GNOME3 came about, and all my remaining motivation/naivety evaporated sudenly. IBM and Sun had already stopped their Accessibility efforts late 2008. And the CORBA->DBus move basically set accessibility efforts back a few years. I was devastated, and also learnt a lot of things. After that, web accessibility started to get worse and worse. These days, most of the modern web is inaccessible to people like me, only a handful of selected applications/sites do work, and the coridor is progressively getting more narrow. I know stories of 40+yo blind people loosing their jobs due to IT restructuring at their company, left and right. The digital divide is here, and nobody is really talking about it anymore, because, frankly, those "in the know" have basically given up. Its a sad story. Capitalism is simply not willing to care for small minorities. Its a fact... which took me over 20 years to fully accept.

I agree 100% and welcome any improvement for any reason.

When most or all of us benefit from "accessibility", then it isn't really accessibility. It is fixing a broken UI, period. Designers need to be shamed for not even providing a good enough UI for the average person, let alone disabled people.

The curb cut is not even that good, the new hotness are elevated crosswalks. Smooth paving also makes a big diffeerence. My wife is on a wheelchair and it's hard to overstate how much these little things improve her life.

> We all benefit from digital (and physical) accessibility

Interestingly though, in this space, wheelchair accessible sidewalks often conflict with tactile paving (for blind people). Those tactile bumps are often inside the curbs, so there's often no way for a wheelchair to avoid them.

I wish I could agree with you, but in my experience the built-in controls have many flaws and have remained stagnant for years or decades.

> discouraging you from using semantically-meaningful classes, and duplicating stuff enormously rather than using sane selectors

In any big site "semantically meaningful classes" are a similar mess, and the duplication is both enormous and spread out and suffers from accidental cascades.

I've felt this way for years, even wrote a blog post [1] about it nearly 2 years ago

It doesn't seem to be getting better, sadly. You get posts like the op, where the author realizes there's something wrong with how they're doing things, but then misses that tailwind is a big part of it. Emperor has no clothes, so everyone else strips naked as well

1: https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...

I think it’s fine to bring an illustrative toy example to an article.

Everyone who works outside frontend will need to parse it a lot. Everyone who works in frontend will be able to project a more complex div soup they’ve experienced in their own projects.

The problem is, a LOT of people are treating documents as if they are apps.

It might be that there is no built-in functionality for some things in pure HTML. But most of the time, standard HTML tags provide all the functionality you need, even for web applications. And this benefits people with disabilities.

You missed the point entirely.

You should still use appropriate tags like a, button, label, input and not div, div, div, div. Even apps have links

Given the morass of JS slathered on every site these days, selector performance is the least of your worries.

Your URL seems to have expired.

In any case it is "Document 32019L0882" which does go into effect on June 28:

> Directive (EU) 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on the accessibility requirements for products and services (Text with EEA relevance)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/882/oj/eng (I think this one is permanent)