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I Made a Site Leveraging AI: How Accessible Was It?

Interesting experiment by Mark Steadman, who used Durable to generate a website.

Using axe-core to scan the site, he found 17 accessibility issues, of which 11 were ‘critical’ and 6 ‘serious’. These included:

• All form elements in “Contact us” section were missing labels
• The carousel buttons were missing an accessible label
• All the images in the “Gallery” were missing alt text

Manually discovered a11y issues included keyboard focus indicators being highly inconsistent – some elements would get it, some would not – and an entire set of images in the gallery being totally inaccessible to the keyboard.

Screen reader support was quite poor too, with multiple links and buttons having the same text, as well as images with poor alt text such as “banner image”.

Mark’s conclusion is fairly positive. AI is here to stay, and the output here is not as bad as it could be (Mark likes the use of native HTML, some practical use of ARIA, and “great” resize support). Mark hopes that one day AI could generate fully accessible websites, but fears that that day won’t come any time soon.

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