The W3C started building ARIA around 2006 because the dynamic web had a blind spot, literally. AJAX pages updated without reloading, and screen readers lost the thread. ARIA's fix was to give every element a role, a state, a label. Translate the visual into the semantic.
Nearly twenty years later, AI agents navigating web pages reach for that same semantic layer first. They can't really see, either. The richest map of meaning on the web was built by engineers thinking about an entirely different audience.