I remember learning about HTML for the first time, maybe in Byte Magazine. It was before I actually had a computer with a browser. But the article talked about a benefit of HTML, which was that the tags could be interpreted by custom browsers for accessibility, including for the blind or sight-impaired. It seemed like a pretty cool idea to me.

Later on, when people started treating web design as a general purpose graphical and GUI framework, many of the accessibility benefits probably vanished.