I read your comment as unnecessarily abrasive, self-entitled almost.
> "It breaks my heart that when this project was started in 2017, some 20 years after web accessibility advocacy had started in earnest, the developer was still uninformed enough about accessibility that they would create a custom button component with no ARIA support."
You're assuming ignorance and malice, when in all actuality this most likely comes down to priorities, and a painful lack of clear standards and tooling. By all means - please submit a patch with what you deem is the right solution here, instead of just expecting things get done your way on day one.
> "The buttons are clickable divs, not actual HTML buttons"
What's an "actual" HTML button we can all safely use to replace simple divs (which are just about the only way to get content to show up and behave uniformely across browsers and platforms, using as little js/css hacks as possible)?
It's almost as if some people get off on the feeling of self-importance they get for 'calling people out' in this manner- the neckbeards of accessibility. In an ideal world, accessibility would come for free - but unfortunately it does not.
Yes I would argue that morally projects should do their best to support it - but even at well established companies it takes significant resources to maintain accessibility. Yes in this case it may be as simple as using native Buttons, as the above comment said, 'that's as far as I got'. Just pretending that accessibility isn't a significant time an resources doesn't make it any less so. If this wasn't true then there wouldn't be legislation to essentially address this market-failure.
It's an intractable problem; most people believe software should be accessible to people with different needs, and most people also believe that other people shouldn't be able to force you to do work for free.
Which one you decide on seems like a value judgement to me. Is it fair that instead of shipping that feature you really want this month, you have to do accessibility features? I don't think the answer is black and white.
FWIW, accessibility seems hard. I am not a good web dev, and the conversations that spin out from these accessibility conversations frequently go right over my head. I can build a pretty basic React site, but I have no idea how to add accessibility components to that, or how I would test whether my site is accessible or not.
Part of this problem is probably lack of exposure. I know what a screenreader is, but I don't know how they work. I don't know what makes it easy to traverse a page with a screenreader and what makes it hard. It would probably help a lot if we forced devs to have experience with accessibility tools so they know they work.
Changing <div> to <button>, passing your website through an "accessibility validator" or adding an accessibility toolbar don't guarantee your website is actually usable on a screen reader (as an example).
Getting accessibility right takes non-trivial effort.
