React Isn’t the Accessibility Villain—Your Code Is
Deque, a major accessibility-focused company, recently published “Debunking the Myth: Accessibility and React” by Mark Steadman. The core message: if a site built with React has poor accessibility, the fault lies with the developer, not the framework. The tools to build accessible experiences are all there.
Steadman’s point is blunt. React didn’t render a <div> where a <button> belonged—that was a developer’s choice. React didn’t litter the page with extra markup when a Fragment would have sufficed. React didn’t skip updating the page title because the developer overlooked it.
Working with React does differ from other frameworks or a CMS, but that difference isn’t a downgrade. It’s just a different approach—neither worse nor inherently harder.
The author is optimistic that well-crafted, accessibility-minded React components can lift the whole web. He shares a pair-programming story: debugging a toggle UI written in a Rails template. Fixing a bug required an HTML change, but the toggle wasn’t componentized—it was a chunk of markup duplicated across dozens of pages. A proper component would have fixed every instance in one shot. That kind of component architecture, encouraged by all JavaScript frameworks, is simply smart front-end design.
As for React’s bad reputation, Steadman isn’t sure where it started. Maybe JavaScript-focused developers skipped essential HTML training. Maybe early, unsemantic React code spread through copy-paste too widely. The origin may stay a mystery, but the takeaway is clear: everyone needs to do better now.
