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points by johnh-hn 17 hours ago | 0 comments

Not mine. I loathe Electron like many people. But, as someone who is legally blind and has very limited vision, being able to have custom UI zoom levels, per application, has made my life much easier.

For a long time, and mostly out of frustration, I wanted to build my own stack of software around my vision. But the mammoth amount of effort it would require meant I never went through with it.

[–] freecodeio 16 hours ago

nice point, people like to shit on the web but it has one of the biggest accessibility features that most of the gui frameworks would just leave them as feature suggestions for years

[–] hajile 16 hours ago

I'd note that as stuff like A11y gets added into something like Discord, we'll see the app slowly bloat up to compensate.

Google Chrome generally used around 25mb per tab in 2010. Today, that number is often 500mb or even 1gb.

[–] saagarjha 1 hour ago

This is mostly because websites have gotten heavier and we want them to run faster.

[–] masfuerte 15 hours ago

And Windows apps had accessibility before computers had 25MB RAM in total. Accessibility is not the cause of bloat.

[–] freecodeio 15 hours ago

do any of these native GUI libraries provide just as rich accessibility experiences to disabled people?

[–] TJSomething 9 hours ago

If we mean native as in OS-specific GUI APIs built-in to the operating system, then yes. All of the browsers are abstractions on top of that. If we mean cross-platform GUI libraries for Rust I think your choices are like Dioxus (a webview), Tauri (also a webview), Slint (draws its own widgets), and maybe Fltk (draws its own widgets) with extensions?

[–] ethin 5 hours ago

Yes, yes they do. WXDragon for Rust, for example, provides quite good accessibility. And maybe accessibility would be better for frameworks like QT or DearImGUI if (1) people didn't act like the web was some paragon of accessibility (hint: it really, really isn't, not when websites misuse web APIs -- which happens quite frequently) and (2) UI framework developers didn't just make a UI framework that looked sexy but left accessibility on the floor.

What's oddly being ignored in this entire thread (so far, as of the time of writing) is that back in 2017-2018 Discord was an Electron app and was completely inaccessible. The web did not magically bring accessibility to the table -- we disabled people had to go yell at Discord to fix their shit, and even then it took them like 2-3 years, and even now Discord has some very very weird accessibility issues that will randomly crop up here and there.

[–] afdbcreid 9 hours ago

The article implies that a11y will exist on launch and maybe already is.

And it doesn't require that huge amount of RAM, no. What requires the Chrome RAM is running JavaScript and do it fast, and a lot of extremely complicated features, most of which a single app will never use.

[–] Ygg2 16 hours ago

Would you really need 500mb for accessibility? Can't text to speech be outsourced to the OS or companion app?

[–] pjmlp 9 hours ago

All the native APIs across major platforms have accessibility features, how do you think browsers implement theirs?

[–] sitzkrieg 5 hours ago

i switched a cross platform application TO web stack for this reason. accessibility and screen reader usability is incredibly important and massively overlooked in many domains