Comment by sublinear
3 days ago
It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work".
Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
I use the web every day as a blind user with a screenreader.
I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
That's really interesting. Are you speaking from experience with websites where you know who authored them or from seeing code written by humans and Opus 4.5 respectively?
So I have been using the human-authored web since well... 1999 or so, starting with old AOL CDs. I've obviously seen a lot of human content.
Back in the old days you might have image links and other fun stuff. Then we entered the era of flash. Flash was great, especially the people who made their whole site out of it (2004 + not being able to order ... was it pizza? something really sticks in my memory here.)
Then we entered the era of early Bootstrap. Things got really bad for a while -- there was a whole Bootstrap-Accessibility library people ended up writing for it, and of course nobody actually used the damn thing. The most frustrating thing at this point (2010?) was any dropdown anywhere. Any bootstrap dropdown was completely inaccessible using typical techniques, and you'd have to do something tricky with ... mouse routing? Gods it's been 15 years.
CAPTCHAs for stupid things became huge there for a brief moment -- I remember needing to pass a CAPTCHA to download ... was it Creative drivers? That motivated me to make a service called CAPTCHA-Be-Gone for other blind people for a while.
Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow! So many times you'd get people who thought "Oh to add accessibility, we just add ARIA" and had no fucking idea what they were doing, to the point where the most-common A11y advice these days has become "Don't use ARIA unless you know you need it."
Oh then we had this brief flash (~10 years ago?) of "60 FPS websites!" -- let's directly render to the fucking canvas, that'll be great. Flutter? ... Ick!
Nowadays the issues are just the same as they ever were. People using divs for everything, onclick handlers instead of stuff that will be triggered with keyboard... Stuff that Opus just doesn't do!
I guess I've only been using Opus 4.5 for about a month but just ... Ask it to build something? Use it with a screen reader? Try it!
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Knowing obscure things you need to do for accessibility is actually something I would expect an llm to be pretty good at.
Satisfying constraints like these isn't merely about knowing the spec and having lots of examples. Accessibility requirements are even more subjective than ordinary requirements already are to begin with.