janadiamond

Exactly. That’s the core of it. Accessibility isn’t really about one perfect design, it’s about whether the system can adapt to different real human needs instead of assuming one “normal” user.

High contrast helps some people, hurts others. Reduced motion matters. Larger text matters. Keyboard navigation matters. The lesson isn’t “pick the one right setting,” it’s “build the underlying structure so people can override presentation safely.”

If the semantics are good, users and assistive tech have options. If all the usability is trapped in the visual layer, things fall apart fast.

Also totally agree on advertising. A lot of ad tech is basically an anti-accessibility machine. It optimizes for attention capture, even when that makes the actual experience worse for everyone. Advertising frequently triggers me, with all the flashing and strobing and moving parts. That one was me, from the post. And I'm the one that needs the high contrast, too ;- )

Nope! Its not you! I'll point that out to the page manager and hopefully they will fix it. GREAT CATCH, thank you!!!

That makes sense. That “show everything at once” approach probably reduces some of the back-and-forth that hypermedia workflows rely on.

It’s interesting that some models can infer structure from hypermedia more easily. That seems like another place where semantic structure ends up helping both humans and machines interpret an interface. NICE!

Interesting point.

One thing HTML has going for it is that accessibility info (semantics, ARIA roles, structure, etc.) is embedded.

Are you finding that agents can make use of that directly, or are you adding more accessibility metadata on top?

That curb cut example is a great example of the pattern. Improvements aimed at a specific accessibility need often end up benefiting more people than expected.

While thinking about this, I realized that accessibility often acts like a kind of stress test for design assumptions. If something only works under ideal conditions, accessibility issues tend to surface those weaknesses very quickly. (I wish I'd known that when I was a tester!)

That’s a good point. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation can all affect readability. A lot of modern design trends assume perfect reading conditions and typical visual processing.

When those assumptions break, accessibility issues start showing up very quickly.