I had to keep accessibility in mind a lot in my previous job (web development for a university). The thing that I consistently found was that, the more accessible a website was, the better the experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities.

In the context of discussing TUI vs GUI (as the article does), the accessibility and keyboard control balance probably swings very strongly to native GUIs; in a TUI you’re at the whim of the TUI framework’s stabs at accessibility support, while on a full fledged native UI you have all the bells and whistles of focus management and text to speech and voice control and high contrast and magnification and motion adjustments…

The idea that it must be more accessible because it’s confined to a mono space typeface and communicates state mostly by changing the foreground and background color of the text it renders makes no sense to me.

I worked on Microsoft’s Windows QA team long ago. My team used to have “No-mouse Tuesdays”: you were supposed to do all your normal work but only using the keyboard.

My father is blind, the only tech he knows how to use is a smart tv, when i build him custom apps the first thing i do is turn off talkback when the app opens, so i can control what tts says. The regular talkback is so so annoying and repetitive

I believe AI can be huge here. Things like ADA are often mechanical (adding the correct attributes to the most important page elements). It is the perfect work to audit and fix using agents.

It is a business opportunity as well. I worked at a company that paid for an audit before LLMs. There is tremendous cost savings possible here.

I also wonder if WebMCP will be the ultimate final incarnation of this.

Yeah unfortunately this seems to be something very few outside of bug tech dedicate resources to. Even for them it seems to be an afterthought, at least in my professional experience. It winds up another compliance checkbox just like security.

This is something that we have been working on in our app, but to be honest: it is hard. At first we wanted to be completely keyboard centric, but we had to pivot away from it.

There is so much to learn in this space.

There are small things, like dropping a 'jump to main content anchor' before the navigation so you don't have to tab through the top navigation everytime.

But there are also certain pages en layouts which require a lot of thought on a good keyboard navigation flow. Combine that with the need for responsive layouts, our inexperience with accessibility tools, etc; and the required effort quickly adds up.

I'm able. I have no idea or wish to go cosplay as my mental model of someone having to use tools to access my website. I use accessibility tests that make sure content has readable colors. I set a content anchor so people can navigate without sight. I would really like to learn about any frameworks that can help me make my websites accesible to everyone. If there a gold standard?

Definitely not a substitute, and a bit slow, but GPT computer use is demonstrating an alternative path with live vision models. I'd be curious how this is fairing for those with vision impairments.

That's a good point. Accessibility is the next step that should also not be ignored. Navigating to the elements is one thing, but for the voice assistant to work properly it can be a little trickier.

That was my first thought, that a TUI is still a GUI. Close your eyes and explain how you can use a TUI from the keyboard. The only difference is what the display can render.

I used to do loads of accessibility testing with my sites.

I was fired because I did too much once

> the second a tab is off

Can you explain what you mean by this phrase?

What do you mean by "a tab is off?"

> Democracy is about access

No, not really. I know what you are trying to say, and I fully agree. We need to stop using "democracy" or "democratizing".

Democracy, in it's purest form, is about mob rule --majority rule, if you want to say it in a softer/kinder way. "Democratizing" means giving a mob control of the thing, it does not mean making it accessible to all at all.

Why not have WMs and DEs specialized for specific disability categories?

Having done exactly this for adding accessibility into a crypto wallet in the past, (yes crypto wanted even the disabled), it is plainly obvious why this is not standard.

It is an absolute train-wreck trying to get everything to work and for the overwhelming majority of products it isnt work the effort. It isnt like you put a wheelchair ramp up and are done. It is a constant battle with every change.

It is just another one of those things where the minuet minority suffers. Now if a company got some tax write off for it, that would change things.

The issue with accessibility is bots from scrapefly or browserbase will abuse website to death. There is reason why we can't have good things due to abuser like scrapefly, browser base, anchor browser etc... I had to turn off all the accessible selector and randomized html soup to make their life harder.