Assistive technologies will still work as the browsers implement platform's assistive APIs.
Automatic testing will still work because a developer isn't going to add restrictions to their own tests from their site. Unless they are testing if a captcha gets shown from an unsafe environment.
Archives, search engines, and spiders should already be respecting robots.txt. Site owners can already block those things if they don't want their site crawled.
>This means that no single party decides which form-factors, devices, operating systems, and browsers may access the Web.
The proposal allows anyone to become an attestor. There would not be a single attestor who you would have to prove your trustworthiness to.
> Assistive technologies will still work as the browsers implement platform's assistive APIs.
Assistive technologies and APIs on devices should not be beholden to the platform owners. It is a problem for disabled communities to need to ask permission to build technologies that make their lives better.
Native platform accessibility APIs are important because it's important for platforms to take steps to guarantee equitable access to sites and apps on their own platforms out of the box and for ordinary users who may not want to or be able to install additional software. However, officially supported native platform accessibility APIs are NEVER an excuse to remove the autonomy and agency of disabled communities.
This shows up all the time in multiple situations -- from Reddit's exemptions of nebulously defined accessibility apps from its API pricing to circumventing assistive technologies in the name of adblocking, to the current proposal. It is an attack on the autonomy and agency of vision impaired or low-mobility users to force them to use only "approved" APIs in order to build assistive technologies or to force them to ask permission before deploying their solutions. It positions the platform as a kind of benevolent dictator, giving the platform an inappropriate level of power and control over disabled communities that should be (when possible) dismantled rather than reinforced.