There was a great interview on @Radio702 with @DrZweliMkhize regarding vaccine rollouts.

Caller had a question asking for alternatives for people who are blind as the registration site doesn't work well with assistive technology.

Thought it should be simple technically.

The registration site is essentially a form "wizard" which a user fills in, and shows / hides content based on what users fill in.

This "should be" simple html. But it isn't.

https://vaccine.enroll.health.gov.za/#/ 

Firstly, prime directive, the developers did the best they could at the time, with the knowledge, resources and constraints they had. One doesn't know what was happening around this.

From inspecting the source, it looks like it was built with @FlutterDev (from googling what flt- tags are).

I'm not familiar with Flutter, but from what I understand, it's one of those "write-once, compile to everything" frameworks.

A difficulty with many of these frameworks is the "agnostic" nature of the development doesn't always compile well into the specific nature of the final platform (e.g. React Native, etc).

This thread here explores more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24962504

Web standards bodies have tried hard to standardise how sites are built, and interface with assistive technologies. Looking at the vaccine registration site, they may not be conforming to these standards (probably because of what Flutter compiles to).

For example, the first question could be a simple <select> element, which would be 4 lines long, and have been easy to add tags to assist with assistive devices. Instead, it compiles / transpiles into a stream of superflous tags, virtually impossible to control.

Going through the wizard, there are more examples of overly complex html output, which could have been solved with simple html, without a frontend framework.

But the complexity added by the framework used has made the site unusable for those it's intended for.

So now, because of this complexity introduced by the choice in framework, the minister has advised that those who are blind present themselves at the nearest registration centre as soon as they open.

In conclusion. Developers, you have more power than you think (for intended good and unintended harm). Your technology choices matter.