ARIA, anti-patterns, and you

Please take a minute to understand what ARIA is and is not. ARIA and especially the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) are commonly misunderstood.I read an article the other day that had this facepalm moment:And with modern LLM agents, turning a spec into working code is surprisingly fast. Point the agent at the APG pattern, describe your component’s markup, and get a solid first draft you can refine and test.This is worrying, and the use of “LLM agents” isn’t the worst part!The APG is not a how-to guide of ‘best practices’ for building accessible websites. It exists to demonstrate how the ARIA specification should work in theory — regardless of support and regardless of whether more accessible, non-ARIA patterns exist (they do).As Eric Bailey notes —The guide was originally authored to help demonstrate ARIA’s capabilities. As a result, its code examples near-exclusively, overwhelmingly, and disproportionately favor ARIA.What I Wish Someone Told Me When I Was Getting Into ARIA -…