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It is a bit of work but navigation with keyboard/gamepad is possible with an immediate-mode GUI, as demonstrated by the excellent work of Omar Cornut (Dear Imgu

• akiselev 6y ago
  Basic navigation with keyboard/gamepad is a trivial case compared to screen reader accessibility and navigation. Take a look at the Windows Narrator keyboard shortcuts [1] like "Next Heading" or "Go to next landmark/region" or "Read row header" - these require integration with the system UI framework or the accessibility APIs directly to provide extra semantic information about what's drawn on screen. Even with integration into system accessibility APIs, Narrator (and other screen readers) performs a lot of heuristics to improve the user experience. These heuristics depend on a separate tree data structure [2] and how it changes over time, so in order to implement even the most basic accessibility, IMGUI would have to retain that information instead of throwing it away every frame. Component identity is crucial to how most (all?) screen readers work today and it's a happy accident that it also allows an efficient hybrid retained-immediate mode architecture. I don't know if it has been fixed or not, but a year or two ago you could completely nuke the Windows screen reader just by assigning React components randomly generated keys so that the DOM nodes would be destroyed and recreated every redraw. [1] https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/narrator-keyboard-shortcuts https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/narrator-keyboard-... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/inspect-objects https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/inspe...