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When redesigning our customer-facing form which contains different kinds of questions - text, currency, selects, radio buttons and checkboxes - the design team did not put any consideration in designing for good accessibility and the engineers did not put enough care in making the product work in screen readers at all. It just had to work and look good.

The form is a react app tha displays the questions one by one and a "next" button on the bottom. We haven't tested this yet but I imagine this is a nightmare for screen readers.

Would it be a good UX practice to aria-hide the whole "fancy" app and have an alternate bare-bones, browser-native <form> that is only visible by screen readers?

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There is rarely a case where a beautiful, elegant design cannot be made accessible. Alternate versions of a page are, sorry to say, a lazy approach. When using native html elements (<button>, <input type="checkbox">, etc), the accessibility is already built in to these elements and the screen reader user can have a delightful experience. If you use custom components made of <div> and <span> elements, those too can be made accessible when using ARIA attributes.

Would it be a good UX practice to aria-hide the whole "fancy" app and have an alternate bare-bones, browser-native that is only visible by screen readers?

99% of the time I would say "no". (It's probably more like 99.8%)

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  • That's what I though, but this is a single-page application where the questions are changing dynamically. It might be a lazy approach but I'm afraid that we'd have to redo the whole thing to make it accessible now.
    – ecc
    Nov 13, 2018 at 14:09
  • "we'd have to redo the whole thing to make it accessible" - not necessarily. SPAs can be accessible, even after they're built. you do have to change a few things but not redo it completely. the main thing is announcing changes (use aria-live) and focus management (when going to the next "page", move the focus to the logical starting point for that page). those two points will make a huge impact on accessibility. see medium.com/@aziz.marwan/… for some other general ideas (not nec just for SPAs)
    – slugolicious
    Nov 14, 2018 at 15:42
  • contact me offline if you need more implementation details. stackexchange is for general concepts and not implementation so i didn't want to post programming tips here. (contact info is in my profile)
    – slugolicious
    Nov 14, 2018 at 15:44
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As long as the page loads correctly and is usable for both disabled and common users in terms of helping them finishing the task, whatever implementation you need to push to achieve that goal is fair.

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