7 ms·

If you want to use this in a business, either for an internal tool or for an application you sell, this is a horrible idea. Godot doesn't display native widget

If you want to use this in a business, either for an internal tool or for an application you sell, this is a horrible idea. Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, for example to screen readers and blind users. Some people think blind people bring too little profit to care, but this is wrong for one single reason. There are some laws mandating accessibility, and more laws are being passed, for example in the EU. Even if you don't really focus on accessibility at this point, you always want to keep your options open, in case the law forces you to. If you choose Electron, WX or even QT, some minor tweaks will usually be enough to make it right. If you choose Godot, you will need to rewrite the whole thing from the ground, which might kill your business, or risk fines and litigation, which might also kill your business. This is even true about internal tools, as there are laws mandating accessibility of the tools used at the workplace, and you never know when a blind person gets hired for a job they theoretically should be able to perform. This might sound very harsh, but it's important to get this right early, as one bad decision here is usually irreversible. Of course, this applies not just to Godot, but to any GUI tool which doesn't implement accessibility properly (including those that theoretically work on the web, but use canvas instead of DOM rendering).

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
Well, if what you are saying were 100% true, the entire VST market would be non-existent. (I agree with you to some extent, but let's not exaggerate to make a point.)
gridlockd 6y ago
Are you speaking out of professional experience? Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard? Imagine the headline "company goes bust due to regulatory violations after hiring blind person". That would basically be sending the message "never hire a blind person", because no company can ever be sure to be in compliance.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  > Are you speaking out of professional experience? Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard? Not sure what are you saying here. Are you saying that while it might become a law, companies that can't find the money to comply don't need to comply in such cases..? Or that it hasn't happened yet, so it's not bound to happen?
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    > Not sure what are you saying here. I'm asking. Often times, people make claims based on what they think should be happening. That doesn't mean it is happening.
- shripadk 6y ago
  You don't need to hire a blind person to be compliant with regulations. What if you are building consumer facing products? Can you pick who your consumer will be? What stops a blind person from using your product? And what if the user is suffering from another physical disability which doesn't let the user operate a keyboard/mouse? What if the employee were a medically fit person but met with an unfortunate accident and lost his/her eyesight/limb and have to now continue job after recovery? How can s/he continue their job? Will you fire the person? You never hired a physically challenged person but s/he can always become physically challenged due to some accident later. > Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard? "Jason Camacho, a blind resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is suing 50 colleges over the accessibility of their websites. The 50 lawsuits, filed in November, say the colleges are in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, as their websites are not accessible to people with disabilities. Camacho uses a screen reader and said he experienced barriers when trying to access the colleges' websites." Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-colleges-sued-barrage-ada-lawsuits-over-web-accessibility https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-college...
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    > What if... What if tomorrow some change of parameters makes my business impossible? I'll go out of business. That's always an option. Dealing with every possible risk ahead of time generally isn't an option. > "Jason Camacho, a blind resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is suing 50 colleges over the accessibility of their websites. This is referring to public websites, which arguably are covered by the ADA. I'm looking more of a story like "We wrote all our software without regards to accessibility. Then we got sued. It bankrupted us." If this was a real problem for software in general, why is there no cottage industry of shady lawyers using people with disabilities to sue software vendors in particular? There's obviously lots of software that is not accessible, or not accessible enough.
    - shripadk 6y ago
      > What if tomorrow some change of parameters makes my business impossible? I'll go out of business. That's always an option. Yes and no one can sue you for going out of business. But you can be sued for violating a law while your business is in operation. > Dealing with every possible risk ahead of time generally isn't an option. No you need not if you use standard software development tools that do it for you. You would need to worry about it if you plan to implement everything on your own. > If this was a real problem for software in general, why is there no cottage industry of shady lawyers using people with disabilities to sue software vendors in particular? There's obviously lots of software that is not accessible, or not accessible enough. When there is a clear law that states that you have to make your software accessible you have no choice but to implement accessibility. For personal use you need not. For open source projects, the implementation rests on the shoulders of those using the project for end-user facing software. You can get away with it for a while, just like you can get away with using pirated software. But then law will catch up anyways. Just because there is no precedent set doesn't mean that it is legally allowed. Would you want to be the first test case? A scapegoat? I bet not! As far as why there are no cottage industry of shady lawyers: Maybe those shady lawyers have bigger fish to catch. Maybe there isn't much awareness about it in the legal circles. Could be variety of reasons why.
- bananaface 6y ago
  Harvard & MIT were sued for putting up free lectures, because they didn't have captions[1]. Harvard eventually settled[2], not sure about MIT. I believe MIT's response was actually to pull a lot of the lectures, but I don't know if that stuck. In that case the main complaint seemed to be that they had more of an obligation because they were receiving federal funding. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit-sued-over-failing-to-caption-online-courses.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit... 2: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/12/2/Harvard-settles-caption-lawsuit/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/12/2/Harvard-settles...
  - ausjke 6y ago
    this is how things work these days, for the sake of equality, minority overrule majority everywhere, i.e. if something makes a small percentage of people unhappy, then it is too unfair, the solution to play it safe, is that let's get rid it of for all.
    - adamsea 6y ago
      Are you complaining that the United States has laws to make sure organizations don’t simply choose to ignore the needs of blind people, deaf people, and other people with disabilities?
      - bananaface 6y ago
        Not the person you replied to, but I do think it's ridiculous that they were able to sue them over free content. All it did was put up barriers against dissemination. I know at least one institution removed lectures because of it. Those courses are just... Gone now. Poof.
- bitwize 6y ago
  See, in the USA we have this thing called the Americans with Disabilities Act, under which providing accessibility options for people with disabilities to access your goods and services is required in order to do business.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    The ADA refers to "public accommodations", which in some cases can include websites. It does not include every single piece of commercial software.
krn 6y ago
> Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, for example to screen readers and blind users. Isn't this also the case with Google's Flutter on iOS by default?
- r8deoh 6y ago
  Flutter on Android too, from what I understand--unless it has changed recently.
- divan 6y ago
  Flutter has Semantics concept baked in from the very beginning. https://flutter.dev/docs/development/accessibility-and-localization/accessibility#screen-readers https://flutter.dev/docs/development/accessibility-and-local...
dilandau 6y ago
It's easier to pull out a soapbox and make ridiculous speeches like these, than to actually make a gui application. If you're making something for free or for fun, then let curiosity guide you. Bureaucrats like yourself can comment all you want. I'll be making applications.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  He's not a bureaucrat. He's a blind person who, I'm sure, has been frustrated many times at the inaccessibility of an application that he needed or wanted to use. So go ahead and make your applications, but please try not to block people who need and want to use them.
syshum 6y ago
>>>This might sound very harsh, but it's important to get this right early, as one bad decision here is usually irreversible. Nothing in software is irreversible >>Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, Then it would be better to evangelize adding accessibility support into Godot. >If you want to use this in a business, either for an internal tool or for an application you sell, this is a horrible idea. There are some laws mandating accessibility, a That largely depends on the type of application and the target. There are some LOB applications that would never need accessibility because the jobs they are for require sight and/or hearing for safety reasons. For example if you are building a LOB application that is used on Factory floor with large machinery
madshiva 6y ago
You can't sue in EU. I know that in US you can sue for everything but this is not at all the case in UE and finally if you have enough profit you could easily have done it. Your whole point have non sense most of 95% application have no handicap mandatory features. I hope this change in the future but suing people don't help acheving that.
brushfoot 6y ago
George Fairbanks's book _Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach_ comes to mind. Fairbanks points out that there's risk in every design. How much it should influence your architecture depends on how much it matters to your project. He uses the example of installing a mailbox. You shouldn't approach that with the same level of planning you'd use to architect a building. They're similar projects in some sense, but risk with the former is so much lower that it isn't worth it. In this case, for some projects, the risk of low accessibility might be significant enough that it should be high priority. For others, dependency churn or framework bloat might be higher. Or tooling capabilities. It depends on what you're building.
nnq 6y ago
Cut the crap, if you're app is really successful you're gonna end up re-writing the UI at least three times, trust me, and you're probably also have to maintain different multiple UIs (think Android native, iOS native, web etc.)... No biggie if one of them is opengl based and might be expensive to add accessibility to it... Oh, and stop spreading fud in general, you might use an accessibility-friendly toolkit and still end up with a practically unusable for visually impaired ppl UI, just as you can make a custom coded UI screen reader friendly... Just be honest, accept that UI dev will eat up at least 50% of your resources if you wanna do it right, don't cheap out on it, embrace re-writes and maintaining multiple versions of similar functionality things, and stop being afraid of new tech...
jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
This is FUD unless you source your claims. - Almost no one does accessibility properly in web apps. Even native apps get it wrong more often than not. - Using Electron does not give you accessibility in any way. - What laws? I use everyday general purpose commercial applications, both webapps and native apps, with glaring accessibility flaws and I do not see anybody caring to sue. - I don't know of any business doing general purpose commercial applications that has faced any issues with that.
- josephg 6y ago
  > - Almost no one does accessibility properly in web apps. Screen readers can still (badly) work on web sites that haven't been made with accessibility in mind. And if you find you need to add proper accessibility to a web or native app, you can. With something like godot, you might have to rewrite the entire GUI to get accessibility working properly. > - Using Electron does not give you accessibility in any way. Yes it does. Electron gives you basic out-of-the-box crossplatform support for accessibility, just like chrome. And you can tweak the screen reader output the same way you would a website. See: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/accessibility https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/accessibility > - What laws? EU: According to the first google result, by September 23 2020 all websites and mobile apps must be accessible to everyone, have a public accessibility policy, provide a feedback mechanism for users to report inaccessible content and provide a link to the enforcement procedure: https://siteimprove.com/en-au/accessibility/eu-web-accessibility-directive/ https://siteimprove.com/en-au/accessibility/eu-web-accessibi... California (govt): As of July 2019 all websites made by the state of california must be accessible: https://www.levelaccess.com/california-passes-new-digital-accessibility-law-state-agencies/ https://www.levelaccess.com/california-passes-new-digital-ac... . There's similar results at the US federal level. > - I don't know of any business doing general purpose commercial applications that has faced any issues with that. You don't know anyone who's faced issues yet. Momentum behind these laws is growing in most countries, bolstered by the 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - which requires countries to "Provide information in accessible formats and technologies appropriate to different kinds of disabilities in a timely manner and without additional cost". In the US and Canada the law currently only requires government websites to be accessible, but its not a safe bet to assume things will stay like that.
TehCorwiz 6y ago
One nit to pick; Electron is just HTML/CSS/JS and accessibility can be as good or bad as any other website. As for the rest, I'm frustrated because you're partially right but also kinda defeatist and that makes me sad. I went checking and found a long history of discussion about accessibility in Godot's GUI toolkit (because the Godot editor is built in the Godot engine). It's an active topic, spanning multiple tickets over years. Their stance has evolved dramatically over time, but they appear to be putting real effort into improving the situation. Here's what I think is the current tracking ticket: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/983 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/983 Accessibility isn't a feature of Godot...yet, but it's obviously something that's important for mainstream adoption of serious software, especially non-audio-visual experience software. And it's obvious that people in the community care and are both asking for it and working on it. If anything we need to keep doing this and revisiting it over and again and keep improving it, testing it, giving feedback, contributing. Because for as many applications that wouldn't benefit from this approach, there are as many that would. Maybe what the community needs is a real-world application which would benefit from these accessibility features to help drive adoption and development.
divan 6y ago
But HTML/CSS/JS is horrible experience even for non blind people :( I haven't learn much about Godot yet (but I will after this post), but Flutter solved accessibility in declarative widget UIs in a way that might be a good example for others.
ZeikJT 6y ago
It's also very possible for existing employees to require accessibility as time goes on. Either old age or an accident can leave them less able than before.
Shorel 6y ago
The solution is not to ban Godot, or Unity or Crytech or any of the game frameworks people and companies use to make videogames. The solution is, as far as it is possible, to add accessibility to these frameworks. Something somewhat common in videogames is to add one or several colour blindness colour palettes to the games.
follower 6y ago
It's fair to identify accessibility as an area where Godot is currently lacking. In addition to the tracking issue mentioned elsewhere, I'm also aware of this project which has the goal of improving accessibility within Godot--both for playing games made with Godot and also for making games in Godot (which is one benefit of the editor being built with the engine itself): * https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-accessibility https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-accessibility * https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-tts https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-tts
neop1x 6y ago
Yes, at the end of the day, one can see why there are UI frameworks like Qt, GTK, Cocoa. It took many, many, many years and people to develop them and they are designed for complex desktop interfaces. I don't like this constant reinvention of wheels. Look at Blender, it also has its own, mice UI and many other specialized graphical, image and audio apps have. Flutter also renders its widgets.But none of them is as universal and flexible as those big, battle-tested frameworks. They are no shortcuts, proper UI is a complicated thing. For quick, simple UIs, you may like Tk or Python's module Tkinter [1]. It is capable of creating pretty fast UIs with little code. Gitk [2] Git UI is written in Tcl + Tk. [1] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_gui_programming.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_gui_programming... [2] https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/gitk https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/gitk
- einpoklum 6y ago
  gitk is a pretty bad example... its fonts are small, difficult to read and have contrast issues; and you can't copy-paste from it (at all? mostly?)

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

Well, if what you are saying were 100% true, the entire VST market would be non-existent. (I agree with you to some extent, but let's not exaggerate to make a point.)

gridlockd 6y ago

Are you speaking out of professional experience? Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard? Imagine the headline "company goes bust due to regulatory violations after hiring blind person". That would basically be sending the message "never hire a blind person", because no company can ever be sure to be in compliance.

BossingAround 6y ago
> Are you speaking out of professional experience? Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard? Not sure what are you saying here. Are you saying that while it might become a law, companies that can't find the money to comply don't need to comply in such cases..? Or that it hasn't happened yet, so it's not bound to happen?
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > Not sure what are you saying here. I'm asking. Often times, people make claims based on what they think should be happening. That doesn't mean it is happening.
shripadk 6y ago
You don't need to hire a blind person to be compliant with regulations. What if you are building consumer facing products? Can you pick who your consumer will be? What stops a blind person from using your product? And what if the user is suffering from another physical disability which doesn't let the user operate a keyboard/mouse? What if the employee were a medically fit person but met with an unfortunate accident and lost his/her eyesight/limb and have to now continue job after recovery? How can s/he continue their job? Will you fire the person? You never hired a physically challenged person but s/he can always become physically challenged due to some accident later. > Do you know of cases where not implementing accessibility really did become a big financial hazard? "Jason Camacho, a blind resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is suing 50 colleges over the accessibility of their websites. The 50 lawsuits, filed in November, say the colleges are in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, as their websites are not accessible to people with disabilities. Camacho uses a screen reader and said he experienced barriers when trying to access the colleges' websites." Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-colleges-sued-barrage-ada-lawsuits-over-web-accessibility https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-college...
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > What if... What if tomorrow some change of parameters makes my business impossible? I'll go out of business. That's always an option. Dealing with every possible risk ahead of time generally isn't an option. > "Jason Camacho, a blind resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., is suing 50 colleges over the accessibility of their websites. This is referring to public websites, which arguably are covered by the ADA. I'm looking more of a story like "We wrote all our software without regards to accessibility. Then we got sued. It bankrupted us." If this was a real problem for software in general, why is there no cottage industry of shady lawyers using people with disabilities to sue software vendors in particular? There's obviously lots of software that is not accessible, or not accessible enough.
  - shripadk 6y ago
    > What if tomorrow some change of parameters makes my business impossible? I'll go out of business. That's always an option. Yes and no one can sue you for going out of business. But you can be sued for violating a law while your business is in operation. > Dealing with every possible risk ahead of time generally isn't an option. No you need not if you use standard software development tools that do it for you. You would need to worry about it if you plan to implement everything on your own. > If this was a real problem for software in general, why is there no cottage industry of shady lawyers using people with disabilities to sue software vendors in particular? There's obviously lots of software that is not accessible, or not accessible enough. When there is a clear law that states that you have to make your software accessible you have no choice but to implement accessibility. For personal use you need not. For open source projects, the implementation rests on the shoulders of those using the project for end-user facing software. You can get away with it for a while, just like you can get away with using pirated software. But then law will catch up anyways. Just because there is no precedent set doesn't mean that it is legally allowed. Would you want to be the first test case? A scapegoat? I bet not! As far as why there are no cottage industry of shady lawyers: Maybe those shady lawyers have bigger fish to catch. Maybe there isn't much awareness about it in the legal circles. Could be variety of reasons why.
bananaface 6y ago
Harvard & MIT were sued for putting up free lectures, because they didn't have captions[1]. Harvard eventually settled[2], not sure about MIT. I believe MIT's response was actually to pull a lot of the lectures, but I don't know if that stuck. In that case the main complaint seemed to be that they had more of an obligation because they were receiving federal funding. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit-sued-over-failing-to-caption-online-courses.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit... 2: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/12/2/Harvard-settles-caption-lawsuit/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/12/2/Harvard-settles...
- ausjke 6y ago
  this is how things work these days, for the sake of equality, minority overrule majority everywhere, i.e. if something makes a small percentage of people unhappy, then it is too unfair, the solution to play it safe, is that let's get rid it of for all.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Are you complaining that the United States has laws to make sure organizations don’t simply choose to ignore the needs of blind people, deaf people, and other people with disabilities?
    - bananaface 6y ago
      Not the person you replied to, but I do think it's ridiculous that they were able to sue them over free content. All it did was put up barriers against dissemination. I know at least one institution removed lectures because of it. Those courses are just... Gone now. Poof.
bitwize 6y ago
See, in the USA we have this thing called the Americans with Disabilities Act, under which providing accessibility options for people with disabilities to access your goods and services is required in order to do business.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  The ADA refers to "public accommodations", which in some cases can include websites. It does not include every single piece of commercial software.

krn 6y ago

> Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, for example to screen readers and blind users. Isn't this also the case with Google's Flutter on iOS by default?

r8deoh 6y ago
Flutter on Android too, from what I understand--unless it has changed recently.
divan 6y ago
Flutter has Semantics concept baked in from the very beginning. https://flutter.dev/docs/development/accessibility-and-localization/accessibility#screen-readers https://flutter.dev/docs/development/accessibility-and-local...

dilandau 6y ago

It's easier to pull out a soapbox and make ridiculous speeches like these, than to actually make a gui application. If you're making something for free or for fun, then let curiosity guide you. Bureaucrats like yourself can comment all you want. I'll be making applications.

mwcampbell 6y ago
He's not a bureaucrat. He's a blind person who, I'm sure, has been frustrated many times at the inaccessibility of an application that he needed or wanted to use. So go ahead and make your applications, but please try not to block people who need and want to use them.

syshum 6y ago

>>>This might sound very harsh, but it's important to get this right early, as one bad decision here is usually irreversible. Nothing in software is irreversible >>Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, Then it would be better to evangelize adding accessibility support into Godot. >If you want to use this in a business, either for an internal tool or for an application you sell, this is a horrible idea. There are some laws mandating accessibility, a That largely depends on the type of application and the target. There are some LOB applications that would never need accessibility because the jobs they are for require sight and/or hearing for safety reasons. For example if you are building a LOB application that is used on Factory floor with large machinery

madshiva 6y ago

You can't sue in EU. I know that in US you can sue for everything but this is not at all the case in UE and finally if you have enough profit you could easily have done it. Your whole point have non sense most of 95% application have no handicap mandatory features. I hope this change in the future but suing people don't help acheving that.

brushfoot 6y ago

George Fairbanks's book _Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach_ comes to mind. Fairbanks points out that there's risk in every design. How much it should influence your architecture depends on how much it matters to your project. He uses the example of installing a mailbox. You shouldn't approach that with the same level of planning you'd use to architect a building. They're similar projects in some sense, but risk with the former is so much lower that it isn't worth it. In this case, for some projects, the risk of low accessibility might be significant enough that it should be high priority. For others, dependency churn or framework bloat might be higher. Or tooling capabilities. It depends on what you're building.

nnq 6y ago

Cut the crap, if you're app is really successful you're gonna end up re-writing the UI at least three times, trust me, and you're probably also have to maintain different multiple UIs (think Android native, iOS native, web etc.)... No biggie if one of them is opengl based and might be expensive to add accessibility to it... Oh, and stop spreading fud in general, you might use an accessibility-friendly toolkit and still end up with a practically unusable for visually impaired ppl UI, just as you can make a custom coded UI screen reader friendly... Just be honest, accept that UI dev will eat up at least 50% of your resources if you wanna do it right, don't cheap out on it, embrace re-writes and maintaining multiple versions of similar functionality things, and stop being afraid of new tech...

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago

This is FUD unless you source your claims. - Almost no one does accessibility properly in web apps. Even native apps get it wrong more often than not. - Using Electron does not give you accessibility in any way. - What laws? I use everyday general purpose commercial applications, both webapps and native apps, with glaring accessibility flaws and I do not see anybody caring to sue. - I don't know of any business doing general purpose commercial applications that has faced any issues with that.

josephg 6y ago
> - Almost no one does accessibility properly in web apps. Screen readers can still (badly) work on web sites that haven't been made with accessibility in mind. And if you find you need to add proper accessibility to a web or native app, you can. With something like godot, you might have to rewrite the entire GUI to get accessibility working properly. > - Using Electron does not give you accessibility in any way. Yes it does. Electron gives you basic out-of-the-box crossplatform support for accessibility, just like chrome. And you can tweak the screen reader output the same way you would a website. See: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/accessibility https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/accessibility > - What laws? EU: According to the first google result, by September 23 2020 all websites and mobile apps must be accessible to everyone, have a public accessibility policy, provide a feedback mechanism for users to report inaccessible content and provide a link to the enforcement procedure: https://siteimprove.com/en-au/accessibility/eu-web-accessibility-directive/ https://siteimprove.com/en-au/accessibility/eu-web-accessibi... California (govt): As of July 2019 all websites made by the state of california must be accessible: https://www.levelaccess.com/california-passes-new-digital-accessibility-law-state-agencies/ https://www.levelaccess.com/california-passes-new-digital-ac... . There's similar results at the US federal level. > - I don't know of any business doing general purpose commercial applications that has faced any issues with that. You don't know anyone who's faced issues yet. Momentum behind these laws is growing in most countries, bolstered by the 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - which requires countries to "Provide information in accessible formats and technologies appropriate to different kinds of disabilities in a timely manner and without additional cost". In the US and Canada the law currently only requires government websites to be accessible, but its not a safe bet to assume things will stay like that.

TehCorwiz 6y ago

One nit to pick; Electron is just HTML/CSS/JS and accessibility can be as good or bad as any other website. As for the rest, I'm frustrated because you're partially right but also kinda defeatist and that makes me sad. I went checking and found a long history of discussion about accessibility in Godot's GUI toolkit (because the Godot editor is built in the Godot engine). It's an active topic, spanning multiple tickets over years. Their stance has evolved dramatically over time, but they appear to be putting real effort into improving the situation. Here's what I think is the current tracking ticket: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/983 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/983 Accessibility isn't a feature of Godot...yet, but it's obviously something that's important for mainstream adoption of serious software, especially non-audio-visual experience software. And it's obvious that people in the community care and are both asking for it and working on it. If anything we need to keep doing this and revisiting it over and again and keep improving it, testing it, giving feedback, contributing. Because for as many applications that wouldn't benefit from this approach, there are as many that would. Maybe what the community needs is a real-world application which would benefit from these accessibility features to help drive adoption and development.

divan 6y ago

But HTML/CSS/JS is horrible experience even for non blind people :( I haven't learn much about Godot yet (but I will after this post), but Flutter solved accessibility in declarative widget UIs in a way that might be a good example for others.

ZeikJT 6y ago

It's also very possible for existing employees to require accessibility as time goes on. Either old age or an accident can leave them less able than before.

Shorel 6y ago

The solution is not to ban Godot, or Unity or Crytech or any of the game frameworks people and companies use to make videogames. The solution is, as far as it is possible, to add accessibility to these frameworks. Something somewhat common in videogames is to add one or several colour blindness colour palettes to the games.

follower 6y ago

It's fair to identify accessibility as an area where Godot is currently lacking. In addition to the tracking issue mentioned elsewhere, I'm also aware of this project which has the goal of improving accessibility within Godot--both for playing games made with Godot and also for making games in Godot (which is one benefit of the editor being built with the engine itself): * https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-accessibility https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-accessibility * https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-tts https://github.com/lightsoutgames/godot-tts

neop1x 6y ago

Yes, at the end of the day, one can see why there are UI frameworks like Qt, GTK, Cocoa. It took many, many, many years and people to develop them and they are designed for complex desktop interfaces. I don't like this constant reinvention of wheels. Look at Blender, it also has its own, mice UI and many other specialized graphical, image and audio apps have. Flutter also renders its widgets.But none of them is as universal and flexible as those big, battle-tested frameworks. They are no shortcuts, proper UI is a complicated thing. For quick, simple UIs, you may like Tk or Python's module Tkinter [1]. It is capable of creating pretty fast UIs with little code. Gitk [2] Git UI is written in Tcl + Tk. [1] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_gui_programming.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_gui_programming... [2] https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/gitk https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/gitk

einpoklum 6y ago
gitk is a pretty bad example... its fonts are small, difficult to read and have contrast issues; and you can't copy-paste from it (at all? mostly?)