That's fair, but my takeaway from this article was that screen readers were this whole other kind of thing that was so much more difficult to use. I could see that being true for someone who never used computers, or for someone used to using them a certain way and having to transition. And I worry that people will read it and come away with the impression that, since screen readers are hard, accessibility is harder and just isn't something they have time/money/expertise for. In actuality, much of accessibility is just using things as they were intended to be used, and attaching textual labels to visual-only elements. If web developers just used <button/> and <a/> instead of <div/>s for interactive elements, there's 90% of accessibility right there. You may be amazed at how hard of a sell just that much is. If the practice of attaching click/keyboard handlers to a <div/> were to be wiped from the face of the earth today and forever, I'd instantly love the web a lot more. :)
So yes, I generally agree that conversational interfaces are a good direction, and I'd like to incorporate them into the app I'm currently building. I just worry that the tone of this article makes the current state of the art sound terrible, when it's less the state of the art and more the implementation details of that state that makes things difficult.
The reason those details are so rarely done right is that the UI frameworks are designed for 2D and serial navigation is an afterthought.
If you build conversation into the core of your UI framework in an intrinsic way, it means everything written in that framework will be done right. Every 2D interaction has a first class conversational analog because conversation is the base interaction primitive and all of the 2D interactions exist within that space.
So yes, I generally agree that conversational interfaces are a good direction, and I'd like to incorporate them into the app I'm currently building. I just worry that the tone of this article makes the current state of the art sound terrible, when it's less the state of the art and more the implementation details of that state that makes things difficult.