2 ms·
Good points overall. The reason nobody posts examples or references is because it's way too damn hard right now. Current accessibility APIs are tightly coupled
by ratww 6y ago
Good points overall. The reason nobody posts examples or references is because it's way too damn hard right now.
Current accessibility APIs are tightly coupled (conceptually and logically) to APIs that originated in the 80s: Win32 and Cocoa.
If you're only using native widgets it's virtually automatic to have full accessibility. But as soon as you need minimal customisation you have to interact with extremely verbose APIs. Cocoa's API is much better, but MS's Automation API is very arcane and complicated, and even MS employees acknowledge that.
On top of that, even if you're using the APIs as intended, the examples provided by Microsoft are low-quality and are not a good starting point for implementing accessibility on non-native.
Thus, only giant corporations have the resources to fully re-implement accessibility in non-native applications. Google can do it in Flutter and Chromium (Electron). Nokia for Qt. Facebook for React Native. But single developers just don't have the power to do it on their lightweight libraries.
What we need is a smaller lower-level accessibility API that gives accessibility to game engines, non-native UI toolkits, TUIs and command line apps. But I don't think there's much incentive coming from OS makers to do it.
- fao_ 6y ago> Current accessibility APIs are tightly coupled (conceptually and logically) to APIs that originated in the 80s: Win32 and Cocoa. You forgot AT-SPI2: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/AT-SPI2/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/AT-SPI2/