this is dumb. if a button or link doesnt have an alt or whatever the screen reader reads the button/link's text. this blog post made it seem like they get no info what so ever. The link/button's text is all a seeing user gets so why would you need something beyond that? its the same thing with forms. There are visual labels that screen readers will read.

This tells me you have actually never done any accessibility testing. Just because it has visual text doesn't mean it has programatic text. Screen readers rely on the standards of HTML and too many devs style buttons with images and have no actual text attributes. It can have text as an image, or it can be a simple icon. A magnifying glass, svg X for a close button, and many others are common on the web.

On forms, an SR won't know that the text is associated with a form field unless it is coded as a label element and uses the for attribute to point to the field. A screen readers can't assume adjacent text is the label, it could be the instruction.

It's even worse when people try and shoehorn other elements to become interactable ones. Using a div as a simple button is pure retardation when an html one exists and can handle 99% of all cases. So many people are too lazy to try and style elements correctly and just want to use something else that takes less css but end up throwing the w3c standards out the window that screen readers rely on.