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I want to live in a world where I can trust developers when they say that the web is for everyone and that equal access is important, and I want to trust them to make educated decisions about what is and isn't possible to make accessible for each project. But if we can't even get people to use buttons instead of divs, if even that turns into some kind of controversy... I don't know, maybe developers shouldn't get to make that choice, maybe the web should force you to use buttons.
Most developers only get to make that choice as long as visibility over their work is shitty enough that any time spent on accessibility is lost in the noise.
The button stuff is one of the few things that could (and should) just be done by default, because it doesn't take any extra effort like a lot of accessibility work. But then again, most devs are working in environments where whatever they would just make a plain old button gets loved to death by some design genius with nothing better to do that week and "signed off on" by 15 people before the dev even hears about it. Then they're making a quick decision between throwing accessibility under the bus (and suffering absolutely zero consequences for it) or pissing off literally everyone that has anything to do with their next round of performance reviews.
Right, which is why we need to somewhat entertain the idea that accessibility shouldn't be optional.
In the business environment you're talking about, I'm generally not in favor of legislating things, but maybe that's a requirement here. My point is that assuming what folkhack says is true, then the "we'll just educate people" idea might just not be feasible -- maybe it just straight up requires laws that force businesses to care.
At least for websites in general we can do things outside of the law that force people's hands. Google can deprioritize search results for pages that are inaccessible, but that won't really affect web apps. Maybe there are non-legislative technological penalties we could impose there as well; if there are certain things that only buttons can do, or if browsers start identifying pages/apps that are inaccessible and displaying warnings on them, or locking certain features.
SSL didn't really get solved until browsers started putting a big scary warning next to the URL bar that said the page was insecure. All the education and tooling was helpful, but it wasn't enough to make businesses care until their customers started asking them why Chrome/Firefox was saying that their app was insecure. It's tricky. I don't want the accessibility community to be the villain here, but it does kind of sound like commercial businesses need to be dragged into an accessible world even if they're kicking and screaming about it.
Most developers only get to make that choice as long as visibility over their work is shitty enough that any time spent on accessibility is lost in the noise.
The button stuff is one of the few things that could (and should) just be done by default, because it doesn't take any extra effort like a lot of accessibility work. But then again, most devs are working in environments where whatever they would just make a plain old button gets loved to death by some design genius with nothing better to do that week and "signed off on" by 15 people before the dev even hears about it. Then they're making a quick decision between throwing accessibility under the bus (and suffering absolutely zero consequences for it) or pissing off literally everyone that has anything to do with their next round of performance reviews.