The thing is, sure, plain HTML pages can be accessible, but my goodness they can be tedious. Sighted browser users don’t particularly care if when they click t

The thing is, sure, plain HTML pages can be accessible, but my goodness they can be tedious. Sighted browser users don’t particularly care if when they click through the page forward/backward links or sort a grid view by clicking a header, if the whole page reloads or if an Ajax call happens in the background. Their mouse pointer and their visual focus remain on the same place on the screen, and whether there’s a flash of white before it reappears, or a slick animated spinner, they can fluently interact with the page regardless of how it accomplishes that interaction. But imagine using a screenreader on such a site where, every time you interact with a grid, it loads up a new page. Every time you do something, the screenreader tells you the page title, starts reading the navigation. You skip to main content. Then you need to navigate back through the table to where you were. Then you need to interact again, and.. boom, back to another page load. This is an experience that can absolutely be enhanced through JavaScript. ARIA makes it possible for you to offer that screenreader user a much more fluent experience, where navigating to another page loads more content and immediately reads it back to you. Sure, the HTML version is always going to be somewhat navigable with a screenreader. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually tolerably accessible.