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I'd rather people just collectively give up on semantic HTML. What is even the source of hope for this cause? The rest of us gave up a long time ago. I'd much rather see energy spent on expanded ARIA support, something that actually moves the needle on accessibility.

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Absolutely. Leave HTML as is and focus on actual accessibility features. They could even add screen reader specific elements and indicate that all other page elements should be ignored. So, you would show one presentation for visual purposes and the other for audible purposes. (Or even braille for feedback purposes.)

Add something to the document that tells it to ignore screen readers as long as a <screenreader> tag is present that puts everything in one place.

> What is even the source of hope for this cause?

Because nested layers of DIV are apparently "semantic"

Documents and humanity in general are complicated and various. You're never going to be able to fully encapsulate the complexities of a document into any (structured) DSL as a result. The recommended approach, failing all other options – even to the semantic people – is to use some standby element, such as DIV or SECTION. Unless you're including people who would say "just change your document to not do anything not representable by Semantic HTML". Add to that, that the list of supported elements aren't even close to approximating what you'd write in 50% of documents.

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