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points by ethin 2 days ago | 0 comments

Yeah, that's what worries me. Pretty much every Rust UI library I've seen which isn't wxdragon/Relm/GTK lacks accessibility. And most of them don't even have the primitives for it (given that most of them are abandoned).

[–] ecshafer 2 days ago

This response doesn't make sense?

GP you asked if there is accessibility P response: yes, here You then respond that worries you and dismiss the proof?

[–] ethin 2 days ago

> This response doesn't make sense?

Apologies. I was noting that the lack of accessibility worried me (well, and weird accessibility breakage too).

[–] rat9988 2 days ago

You are dismissing again the answer you are getting. Why do you think it is lacking accessibility despite using a framework claiming " GPUI Kit ships 75+ documented components and primitives, WebAssembly support, AccessKit accessibility"

[–] d1sxeyes 2 days ago

To be clear, GPUI Kit is not the same as GPUI. I am not sure if Discord is using GPUI Kit, but accessibility natively is possible with either.

It's reasonable to be concerned that Discord may not have focused on accessibility while rewriting.

It's less reasonable to be concerned that it may be impossible to write accessible apps using GPUI, as that is now possible (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/gpui/...) although this is a fairly recent addition.

It's also less reasonable to assume that an app made with GPUI Kit will automatically be accessible. You still need to put effort into it.

[–] somenameforme 1 day ago

I don't know why people are ignoring the pink elephant here. For medium scale projects, like a Discord app is going to be, LLMs are now at a superhuman level of competence, including on higher level architectural/structural type decisions. I would be beyond surprised if the rewrite wasn't largely done by Claude (or similar). And in this context accessibility is also just a prompt away, if it wasn't included from the get-go, which it probably would have been.

[–] ethin 1 day ago

Accessibility isn't just something you one-shot. It takes a lot of back-and-forth and testing with actual screen readers/accessibility scanning tools to be good.

[–] ethin 1 day ago

I'm not dismissing it, just uncertain how good it is. Quality over quantity and all that. You can have 75 or 100 or 200 UI components and some can be perfectly accessible while others might not be even things accesskit supports right now. Or Accesskit may only partially support a widget. As I've said downthread, I'm hoping that Discord using a UI toolkit like this will cause upstream effects with respect to Accesskit coverage, so we'll have to see when they start migrating people over to it.

[–] marcprux 2 days ago

This is exactly why I started working on Day (https://daybrite.dev) as a successor to Skip (https://skip.dev). It uses platform-native toolkits everywhere, and so accessibility comes for free.

I haven't exactly "launched" it yet, but I'm already shipping apps through the App/Play Stores. See https://daybrite.dev/showcase/ for the 5-minute tour.

[–] tommica 2 days ago

Oh that looks fricking neat! Might wanna port my little diff-tool to this for funsies!

[–] nextaccountic 2 days ago

It was real world use by COSMIC that motivated Iced to add a11y support in the first place

So Discord using gpui could mean it may get the needed features

[–] Klonoar 1 day ago

COSMIC runs a fork of iced and things don’t make it back upstream nearly fast enough due to the one-maintainer-bus-factor.

You can’t exactly lump them together.

[–] tensor 2 days ago

I don't understand. You can do accessibility with GPUI today. I linked a repo that shows how.

[–] ethin 2 days ago

Yes, and this is good progress (my comment downthread was before I just looked). According to it it uses accesskit, which is quite good already but still in development so accessibility would not be as good as using UIA directly. I am hopeful though that accesskit (which is also used in Godot) will keep getting better and these gaps can be closed.

[–] tensor 2 days ago

Yeah, and big products like discord using them should help push that along.

[–] selfmodruntime 1 day ago

Turns out the browser (electron) wasn‘t always horrible after all.