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I wonder if that will make devs care more about a11y - to make it accessible for AI

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net

It's neat to see them encourage developers to add ARIA tags to pages though, an "agent" can be thought of as effectively another form of assistive technology

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I fear that even if AI does compel some devs to (finally) take accessibility seriously, a web that is full of AI-generated content becomes a web that’s less accessible for everyone

Weird how we only start to care about accessibility when we realize it may stave off model collapse a little bit. Not like we're actually going to learn web standards and how to code accessibly if we can avoid it because AI is now a littttttle better about making slop that's accessible.

Definitely. But sites that provide a service that's interesting to an AI agent (think booking engines and stuff) could see this as incentive to improve a11y. And (accidentally) make it better for humans too. Sad order of priorities though.