Here’s background on standard HTML controls, their history, and their future development: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-select-native-h

Here’s background on standard HTML controls, their history, and their future development: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-select-native-html-form-controls/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/11/standardizing-selec... The future of accessible web controls is likely Open UI - building standard, agreed upon controls that codify how “modern” widgets behave, though each browser might integrate the standard control with their underlying OS platform and/or screen reader conventions. If you’re familiar with how JavaScript has stages of approvals for proposals, they have those as well: https://open-ui.org/working-mode https://open-ui.org/working-mode Like adopting new JS functions that make our lives easier, there will come a day when we need a particular new control and it’s up to us as web devs to help standardize and push the web forward. There are a number of proposals already, but it’s arguable that some controls, especially existing ones, need much more flexibility in their specification to make them easier to style and override to match a theme. https://open-ui.org/ https://open-ui.org/ has what they’re working on, a long list in the menu (hidden away on mobile). As I write this I recognize there is a lot more to web accessibility and usability than simply using custom controls, but browser makers ultimately want to innovate and solve these challenges within the HTML spec as it will help their own efforts in building for the web. Back in the day we thought it was meaningful semantic HTML when we picked an em (emphasis) tag over an italic tag, or strong over bold. Now, we should try to use dialog instead of divs and who knows, in the future, we might use an infscroll tag instead of an ordered or unordered list. Innovation always happens faster than standardization, but just because we’re upset with the lack of functionality in a textarea does not mean we should be satisfied with our progress reinventing the wheel. We should finish the job and contribute back to HTML the custom controls we value most as standards for the benefit of future web developers and designers, including ourselves.