Typesetters used to arrange individual metal letters to print a page. Cartographers used to draw maps by hand, measuring distances with chains and compasses. Telephone operators used to manually connect calls by plugging cables into switchboards. Accountants used to calculate ledgers with pen and paper. Bank tellers used to balance accounts by hand at the end of each day.
And navigators used to plot ship courses with sextants, charts and looking at the stars. That makes me wonder what they did when it was cloudy.
Most of these jobs still exist today, but they've changed. The tedious, repetitive parts got automated or simplified by tools. What used to take hours now takes minutes. What required years of specialised training might now need a few weeks of learning some software.
Navigators measured angles to stars and did complex math to figure out where the hell they were on an endless ocean. Now GPS tells you your exact position in seconds.
But navigators still exist. They understand weather patterns, shipping lanes, fuel efficiency and how to read sea conditions. They plan routes around storms and political boundaries. The skill didn't vanish. It became a backup system and a deeper understanding rather than the constant boring grind of that job. Not to mention they can now do it when it's cloudy.
Now think of automated tests for accessibility.
Some people worry that automated tools will replace accessibility expertise. Maybe the same way GPS might have seemed threatening to navigators. But that's not what happened. Navigators didn't become obsolete. They got freed up to focus on the complex stuff. Understanding weather patterns, planning efficient routes, making judgment calls that no computer can make.
Everyone will tell you automated tests are limited and they catch only the obvious stuff. But isn't that good? You run a scan, get a list of issues and fix them in minutes. It's faster and more consistent than manually checking every element on every page. Missing labels, colour ratios, basic HTML structure. That's valuable. That's the grunt work that used to eat up hours of testing time.
And yes, an automated test can't tell if your alt text is actually useful or just technically present. It can't know if your navigation makes sense to a screen reader user. It can't judge if your interactive widget is confusing as hell even though it passes all the checks. It can't experience your site the way a real person with a disability would.
That's okay. It's not meant to.
An automated test isn't meant to replace expertise. The tools handle the repetitive checks so you can spend time on the complicated shit that actually matters.