A11Y is UI architecture

I once had what seemed like a straightforward task: clicking a button in a list item should pop up a form asking for additional info, with submit and cancel actions. We decided to think about good UX from the start, and that's when the questions began. The design called for the form to appear right where the user clicked. Is that a popup? Or a dialog? Do we need a backdrop? Should it close on Esc? What about the Android back button — should it dismiss just the overlay or navigate away from the page entirely? And next sprint we had socket-based notifications coming, which raised a whole new set of questions about transient UI. This was one of those rare cases where we decided to skip off-the-shelf component libraries and build everything ourselves. The questions kept piling up, so I went straight to the WAI-ARIA spec . The discovery: accessibility is architecture As I dug into accessibility, I found something I didn't expect — a rigorously defined system for describing interfaces in ter