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I agree with this. Unfortunately that’s a designer bottleneck rather than anything else. Think of it this way, if somebody ends up with a mess of an Electron ap

I agree with this. Unfortunately that’s a designer bottleneck rather than anything else. Think of it this way, if somebody ends up with a mess of an Electron app, he or she probably wouldn’t have fared any better in usability with a native app even if the UI would look superficially ‘in-spec’. Edit: Also as an example, Aether comes with plenty of shortcuts, or even has proper tabbing and tab highlighting for low-vision users. Electron prevents none of these, in fact the platform it’s based on, the DOM, is one of the most accessible platforms ever made in terms of support. Whether people actually make use of it it is another matter.

dewey 7y ago
I wouldn't necessarily say it's just the way it looks, it's also how things work that you get for "free" when you use the native UI toolkit. Examples would be shortcuts, tabbing through form fields, how a file explorer works and other small things. The file explorer in VSCode for example doesn't really behave like a native one, you have to manually refresh, you can't easily drag and drop and everything just feels a bit off.
- httpsterio 7y ago
  Just last week I added shortcuts to our MacOS and Windows Electron app in about 15 minutes. I didn't read any documentation and I'm not even a developer, just a designer. I can barely make a proper if loop in js and I can't tell the difference between a method and a function either. Electron is sooo simple. I mean, we've run into some pretty interesting issues like with hardware acceleration and difference in color and font rendering between platforms, but if a guy like me can code, sign and ship a fully functional application, anyone can. Also, I can really recommend Vue and Quasar for anyone looking at building electron and mobile apps. Really fun!
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    There’s a lot more to getting an app to feel native than just shortcuts, unfortunately. A native platform toolkit will do the right thing for your platform, sometimes even if you don’t know what the right thing is or that it exists.
    - recklessplayer 7y ago
      I completely agree with this. As a blind screen reader user, Electron apps are 90% inaccessible to me and other screen reader users. Screen readers (on any platform) interact with the underlying libraries/ frameworks. Every operating system supports its own native toolkit. It's a shame that Java's SWT framework fell out of favor for cross-platform software. That is quite accessible. Unfortunately, blind screen reader users are overlooked when it comes to these types of underlying frameworks.

dewey 7y ago

I wouldn't necessarily say it's just the way it looks, it's also how things work that you get for "free" when you use the native UI toolkit. Examples would be shortcuts, tabbing through form fields, how a file explorer works and other small things. The file explorer in VSCode for example doesn't really behave like a native one, you have to manually refresh, you can't easily drag and drop and everything just feels a bit off.

httpsterio 7y ago
Just last week I added shortcuts to our MacOS and Windows Electron app in about 15 minutes. I didn't read any documentation and I'm not even a developer, just a designer. I can barely make a proper if loop in js and I can't tell the difference between a method and a function either. Electron is sooo simple. I mean, we've run into some pretty interesting issues like with hardware acceleration and difference in color and font rendering between platforms, but if a guy like me can code, sign and ship a fully functional application, anyone can. Also, I can really recommend Vue and Quasar for anyone looking at building electron and mobile apps. Really fun!
- saagarjha 7y ago
  There’s a lot more to getting an app to feel native than just shortcuts, unfortunately. A native platform toolkit will do the right thing for your platform, sometimes even if you don’t know what the right thing is or that it exists.
  - recklessplayer 7y ago
    I completely agree with this. As a blind screen reader user, Electron apps are 90% inaccessible to me and other screen reader users. Screen readers (on any platform) interact with the underlying libraries/ frameworks. Every operating system supports its own native toolkit. It's a shame that Java's SWT framework fell out of favor for cross-platform software. That is quite accessible. Unfortunately, blind screen reader users are overlooked when it comes to these types of underlying frameworks.