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points by the__alchemist 2 days ago | 0 comments
This is one angle. I do not see it as a deal breaker in the way you phrase it. I suppose we all have our own. If everyone's had to be satisfied, we'd have no software!

I think in the specific case of Discord, I.e. from a big company, I agree they should handle this properly. As a broader standard, I am not as concerned.

[–] ethin 2 days ago
This is a dealbreaker for me even if I didn't want it to be. If your application does not either interact with a11y frameworks (UIA, AT-SPI, NSAccessibility, ...) or does not implement an equivalent that communicates with my screen reader, I literally cannot use your application. I could OCR your application, or use AI and have it use your app for me via screenshots, but neither are even remotely comparable to using the native platform accessibility frameworks.
[–] veverkap 2 days ago
Could someone use AI to make the GPUI kit become accessible? You (or someone else) mentioned that it doesn't even have the primitives so is it a non starter?
[–] ethin 2 days ago
No, I mentioned that most rust UI toolkits lack even the primitives. The primitives for even basic accessibility, without accessibility frameworks, would be things like focus events, carrot navigation, navigation in containers such as list/combo boxes, line/paragraph handling in multi-line edit boxes and the like. Adding native accessibility forces you to do a lot of this but just in a different way than routing text directly to a screen reader.

As for me doing it? According to prior comments in this thread it's already done, although I haven't tested it so I don't know how complete it is. Adding UIA support to a framework is different from making that support good (screen readers can be very picky). As an example, say you have a label of an edit box. If you position the label just right within it's parent container a screen reader will pick it up automatically and just announce it as you focus the edit box. But if you don't, all you'll hear is "edit <contents|blank>". There are ways around this (e.g., you can override label detection) but the "ideal" state is that the screen reader picks up that stuff automatically and you just give it the bounds of the various controls and UI elements.

[–] Forgeties79 2 days ago
It’s potentially a dealbreaker for millions of people whether they want it to be or not unfortunately. For them accessibility is not optional or can otherwise be taken as a “wait and see” issue.
[–] selfmodruntime 1 day ago
Neatly phrased comment, where „fuck the blind“ would have sufficed.