Comment by K0nserv
3 days ago
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?
3 days ago
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!
> Then we see ARIA start to really come into its own... except that's a whole new shitshow!
I am not blind, but my experience trying to write accessible web pages is that the screen readers are inconsistent with how they announce the various tags and attributes. I'm curious what you think about the screen readers out there such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc. and how devs should be testing their web pages.
Many of the larger corporate clients tend to standardize on the exact behavior of JAWS and I am not sure that is helpful. It's like the Internet Explorer of screen readers.
If you want to know why a page ends up riddled with ARIA overriding everything, that's why. In even the best cases, the people paying for this dev work are looking for consistency and then not finishing the job. It's never made the highest priority work either since testing eats up a ton of time.
To reinforce my original point, I just don't think LLMs can write anything but the most naive code and everyone has opinions and biases completely incompatible with standardization. It's never "done" and fundamentally fickle and political just like the rest of the web.