alt Hacker NewsJust coming off a wild ride where a client was sued by a non-customer and a rapacious legal firm, who claimed that said client's website was not sufficiently accessible.
The day after the lawsuit was filed, a company specializing in accessibility testing mysteriously contacted the client, offering a solution. Client had not even gotten notice of the litigation yet.
The net result of this was several tens of thousands of dollars spent actually removing Aria tags and using standard modern HTML on their aging website, to barely meet some threshold that appeared to be compliant.
The company who did the "work", and I mean, it was barely any work, maybe 100 LoC, stands by it and says the client won't get sued again, as long as they pay for ongoing compliance testing. So it's all a fucking racket.
I pointed out to the client that I didn't think that this half-assed effort was remotely sufficient to actually improve accessibility, but they had an interesting response. Which was this:
In 3 years, all this compliance shit will be out the window, because AI screen readers and agents are going to make the whole point moot.
I can't really disagree with that.
Replies
> In 3 years, all this compliance shit will be out the window, because AI screen readers and agents are going to make the whole point moot.
Since the whole compliance racket is totally disconnected from actual accessibility outcomes, why would AI have any impact here?
There’s a standard and a law and money to be made.
Excellent response. I said it before, forcing the responsibility of making thing accessible on the world makes no sense now (made sense before though). Just use an AI to interact with the app/website; it can provide whatever sort of accessibility you need. It should be built as a chrome extension or even native...