He said something like: accessibility cannot be simply duct-taped on. It's a fundamental part of the core web technologies, that all the JS frameworks have obsfucated.
I wonder if GP Meant something like this. Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible. Or am I wrong about this?
> Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible
Nope. Dialog, progress, details, many input types, etc html tags are not very accessible by default and behave differently in browsers.
From the top of my head, you cannot get a proper date picker in safari using html alone.
You also need to change attributes to help navigate the user.
Mind you, accessibility goes beyond screen readers. You will need javascript for building gesture controls, keyboard shortcuts, etc which is very needed for people with restricted movements.
Many people will need UX feedback to understand what is going on. You cannot achieve that without Javascript. Animations, focus, etc are all part of usability and comes under accessibility.
HTML is not accessible by default, so this should not be confused with a simplistic "SPAs/JS are bad!" argument. In fact, many JS component libraries make it easier to comply with a11y since they can encapsulate and consistently share a11y needs like aria attributes, etc.
That's a nice principle, but legally the burden is on the website owner. We have to live within the reality that browsers do not provide, out of the box, accessible html components in some cases.
Having worked some in 508 compliance space -- if you treat it like a patch, you'll get a lot of different testers suggesting to try different things to fix it to bring it up to standards. I.e. the situation you are in.
