Great article and an important reminder. Accessibility is something I am becoming more aware of in my own development practices and have lots to improve upon.
This brings back why truly understanding the basics of how websites are built at the HTML level is so important and how many inherent benefits come from doing things as right as possible.
A mind-bending rabbit hole I recently went down is how difficult it is to actually get helpful alt
text for user avatars.
In nearly all cases you will just see <img src="..." alt="Avatar image for {username}" />
, but that is not descriptive of what's in the actual image and can be repetitive if announced by a screen reader next to the author's username, which is pretty common (see any forum post).
The solution is to give user's an option to enter their own descriptive text, but that opens a whole other UX can of worms and will be simply ignored in most cases. I love the idea of AI to help out here to fill out the blanks, and AI for accessibility in general has been one of my favorite use cases for this new technology.