There is a new reading order attribute coming to fix this.

There already is one in ARIA that supports this: aria-owns [1] and to some degree aria-flowsto [2]

But with everything in ARIA, it always depends on real-world support of screen readers, which is very poor. You have to work with what actually works unfortunately.

Imo changing order just to change the streaming order for a tiny performance gain is not worth breaking the UX for people with accessibility needs.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

Why wouldn't they just amend the existing feature so it's accessible?

Backwards compatibility I'd assume. Someone could have taken advantage of the fact they flex order and accessibility order are different.

Changing the functionality now would break those sites, adding a new CSS prop would make the fix opt-in.

Managed tabindex would solve that. Sounds like a nightmare to maintain though.

tabindex only affects tab order (of interactive elements), not the order that a screen reader navigates and reads out content (including non-interactive elements)

And how is <slot> for accessibility?