At the end of the day it’s your users’ problem. Ideally their assistive tech would work, but if it doesn’t and you’ve got an easy fix then you should implement that fix.
I disagree. Of course you could fix that. But that would mean that you can fix a thousand and one issues that's caused by other softwares erroneous content handling. Which leads to nothing but bloat and introduces just more code that could come with more bugs.
If your software works and is designed as intended, then sometimes it stays the users problem. Unfortunate, but otherwise problems will stay forever.
Your software isn’t working, because the user cannot use it. Your UI is always a combination of whatever hardware and software come together to give an experience. Everyone chooses to marginalise certain segments of users’ technologies – I don’t support IE any more of course – but I typically won’t drop support for technologies that are vital assistive technologies for that segment of users.
(If you need a personal story to bring it home, the only way my dad, a programmer in the 70s-90s, could continue to use computers when he suffered from MND / ALS, was to use voice control software.)
You’re basically enabling for these shitty variants of voice control software to exist. Html, css and js allow dor more granularity in how ui works, but using them this way is just absurd.
shrug They exist regardless, and the users have no real other options. I’ve found in my career that devs tend to fall into the “caring about the effect” and “caring about the artefact” buckets, and I guess you’re in the second category? There’s no one right place to be – without people in the second we‘d have less effective solutions overall – but I hope your team is also balanced by people in the first.
