alt Hacker NewsNo one has done more damage to web accessibility than the web accessibility industry. Arcane rules like this make any sane developer throw up their hands in disgust.
I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.
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It's not really arcane, a div is meaningless because it's simply a container. If you want it to have meaning you can't just add a label. If I put the word "button" on a rock, it doesn't make it a button. That's the same story here.
Is this an arcane rule? "Don't label divs" and "aria-label is for when there's no content in the DOM that can be read" are pretty simple rules. Labels are ways to tell a screen reader about content it can't read, like an image or icon. Pretty straightforward.
It's way way simpler than, say, var hoisting in JavaScript.
> I think the accessibility consultants like this state of affairs: they can threaten more lawsuits and extract more in consulting fees.
I think there is truth in this. A lot of the assistive technology (AT) vendors, also sell consultancy.
Go to the Vispero career pages (who develop JAWS for Windows) and a big chunk of the jobs are remote consultancy roles advising clients on accessibility errors and selling for billable hours.
What makes a web page accessible? Why, it has to work with JAWS, of course!
Vispero makes a lot of money from this; the consultants are all in India, the clients are all in the West, so they can hoover up the difference. I get the impression most AT vendors are extremely cheap, which may explain why it takes decades for them to improve things