Comment by lynx97
Now, imagine how the world feels from my perspective (100% blind). In my 20s, I was enthusiastic. Joined Debian to found the Debian Accessibility Project. Did a lot of packaging of obscure assistive technology software. Submitted a11y bugs (and actually got them fixed) to major products like Eclipse and Qt. Felt like I could really make at least a small difference. Then, time passed, and experience accumulated. I learnt that only an infinitesimal fraction of contributors is actually motivated/willing to help with niche areas like Accessibility. I learnt that the "scratch your own itch" attitude of FLOSS is a reason why Accessibility doesn't happen. Then, GNOME3 came about, and all my remaining motivation/naivety evaporated sudenly. IBM and Sun had already stopped their Accessibility efforts late 2008. And the CORBA->DBus move basically set accessibility efforts back a few years. I was devastated, and also learnt a lot of things. After that, web accessibility started to get worse and worse. These days, most of the modern web is inaccessible to people like me, only a handful of selected applications/sites do work, and the coridor is progressively getting more narrow. I know stories of 40+yo blind people loosing their jobs due to IT restructuring at their company, left and right. The digital divide is here, and nobody is really talking about it anymore, because, frankly, those "in the know" have basically given up. Its a sad story. Capitalism is simply not willing to care for small minorities. Its a fact... which took me over 20 years to fully accept.
The only viable approach I can think of is to completely rewrite everything from scratch. It's a huge undertaking, but I honestly think it's less work than getting the existing software infrastructure to work accessibly. Even heroic efforts like AccessKit just aren't heroic enough.
We've got a few decent speech synths, but information about how things should be read out isn't passed through to them. That's handled by a screen reader program… except screen readers can't represent half the semantics they should, so people regularly bypass them, which leads to (a) UI inconsistency; and (b) the systems being useless if you need something other than a screen reader. AI scraper bots are the straw that broke the camel's back, so virtually no (current) website is accessible via a basic web browser any longer. UI customisability was low in the Windows 95 days, but we've managed to go backwards from there.
We might as well go the whole way, and design something that's actually usable, then put together case-by-case compatibility layers. Here's how we translate Home Office Design System HTML, here's how we translate Stacks Design System HTML, here's how we translate MediaWiki HTML, here's how we translate Wordpress Gutenberg HTML, here's how we translate Moodle HTML… here's how we represent the OpenDocument content model for reading and writing, here's how we represent the SVG content model for reading and writing, here's how we represent a login flow…