4 ms·

Looks nice, but like almost all promising new UI toolkits accessibility is not even mentioned.

by api 5y ago

zellyn 5y ago
I think everyone is waiting for AccessKit to be ready…
- paulgb 5y ago
  For those (like me) just hearing about AccessKit, I assume it's this: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit Neat! I really like the Rust ethos of creating modular cross-platform adopters (e.g. winit, getrandom), and from a brief skim this seems to fit that model.
- jamil7 5y ago
  Very cool, didn't know about AccessKit.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Sorry folks, that's not my day job, and I haven't had much energy lately to work on it on the side.
  - rauljara 5y ago
    Thanks for the work you did do! It’s out there, so whether you finish it, someone forks it, or it just serves as inspiration for another project, you’ve contributed.
ginko 5y ago
People keep bringing up accessibility whenever UI toolkits are mentioned, but wouldn't it be simpler to just have a CLI interface for whatever your program is doing?
- yoz-y 5y ago
  Depends, accessibility is a spectrum. Most people don't need a fully voice/gesture based interface but can get by with good contrast controls and font sizing (as in, the fonts need to be able to get huge). Accessibility is also being able to use the interface only with a keyboard, or only with a mouse or specialized controller with 2 buttons.
- dagmx 5y ago
  How would that work for something that needs to display an image or other media?
- pqb 5y ago
  Funny you mention that, it reminds the post I have read few seconds ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224197 I am person, who in last few days tried out to use VoiceOver and move responsibility on it to navigate me and read contents, when I could code while I had closed eyes. Ironically the most annoying interface was CLI, because I had to extend my focus on contents of the terminal. Imagine running docker-compose up and you are going to spammed with reading all logs. Next, usually I had problem to find some relative point that I could mark a "milestone" in my head, which will be further point from I will be reading. Also, not all commands are read after executing them. Such command is silly pwd. Everytime I write it down I had to move the VO cursor to read the contents. Also many characters I would recognize as a programmer VO reads differently. Nano editor was complete unusable for me. While in vim I had notable problem to recognize indentations characters (sometimes they are read and sometimes they don't) and to know in what mode am I actually. brew update+upgrade was a nightmare for me. All kind of separators like #### are read as "number", "number" spam. The same situation was with "clear" command. It was read a hundreds of "space", "space", "space"... I was starting to think I am going to the Moon or I play Portal 2 [0]. I could continue writing down my disappointment about the CLI interface that was among my favorites in past but now after this week with VoiceOver I think it is terrible to be blind, because most of time I had to use my eyes to help myself to recognize where I am and what I need to click to move to next element. I was very surprised by the rofi-like find of elements that are on the screen (named as Rotor feature, CapsLock+U). With VO I don't any longer needed to use mouse, which for anybody who has problem with wrists is also a nice thing to consider. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiaxOkyKbDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiaxOkyKbDI
clarkmoody 5y ago
That's right. Accessibility is one of the last things to figure out after all of the other tricky things: proper event handling for sane keyboard navigation, efficient layer clipping / redraw, advanced text layout / style, animations, expanded compatibility across platforms, etc, etc. And then accessibility brings with it the integration with different OSes via disparate APIs, so it will take some effort to offer a cross-platform API to the library user. You'll notice that Iced is not >= 1.0 yet, so you shouldn't expect it to be fully-baked.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  On the one hand that's understandable, but on the other hand it appears to be almost 2 years old already and if people start to actually use it in its current state the lack of accessibility will become problematic.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Accessibility seems like the kind of thing that would need to be baked-in from the start right? Bolting on accessibility after everything else has already been built seems like a recipe for a half-assed solution.
  - clarkmoody 5y ago
    Luckily large refactors are relatively painless in Rust.
slingnow 5y ago
It's almost like they want to make sure it works for the vast majority of people before they spend time and effort making it work for a much smaller segment of their userbase.
- ZenPsycho 5y ago
  so they should tackle accessibility (20%) before mac (8%) and linux (2%) support
  - nybble41 5y ago
    The odds are good that the fraction of this project's user base—developers writing GUI applications in Rust—who would be interested in Linux support is much more than 2%.
    - ZenPsycho 5y ago
      i thonk you’ve forgotten what the point of developing software is
- b3morales 5y ago
  Accessibility is not a bolt-on extra feature, it's core to being able to make a product that suits all your users. Everyone needs, or will need, accommodation sometimes. When you have an accident waterskiing and end up on crutches, you'll be glad for the accessibilty of doors that open with a button press. When you poke your eye hiking and need to wear an eyepatch for a few weeks, a screen reader might not seem such a niche use case. These are even kind of extreme examples: frankly, even stuff like dark mode that we take for granted at this point is an accommodation to how some people need or want to use their computers. Migraines are a good example of an (astonishingly) common condition that benefits from flexibility around having to stare at a screen. None of us gets younger as the days go by, either, and that comes with changed needs. I'm still thirty years from retirement and I find that the 10 point font I used to prefer isn't good enough anymore. Bumping up text size is a quotidian action for me and millions of other people. ADDITION: Ah, finally found the quote I was looking for. Maybe not directly relevant, but thought-provoking: > SMS texting was invented [to] figure out a way for deaf people to communicate with one another without speaking. ... Now text messages are universal. https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibility-helps-everyone https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...

Looks nice, but like almost all promising new UI toolkits accessibility is not even mentioned.

by api 5y ago

Looks nice, but like almost all promising new UI toolkits accessibility is not even mentioned.

zellyn 5y ago

I think everyone is waiting for AccessKit to be ready…

paulgb 5y ago
For those (like me) just hearing about AccessKit, I assume it's this: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit Neat! I really like the Rust ethos of creating modular cross-platform adopters (e.g. winit, getrandom), and from a brief skim this seems to fit that model.
jamil7 5y ago
Very cool, didn't know about AccessKit.
mwcampbell 5y ago
Sorry folks, that's not my day job, and I haven't had much energy lately to work on it on the side.
- rauljara 5y ago
  Thanks for the work you did do! It’s out there, so whether you finish it, someone forks it, or it just serves as inspiration for another project, you’ve contributed.

ginko 5y ago

People keep bringing up accessibility whenever UI toolkits are mentioned, but wouldn't it be simpler to just have a CLI interface for whatever your program is doing?

yoz-y 5y ago
Depends, accessibility is a spectrum. Most people don't need a fully voice/gesture based interface but can get by with good contrast controls and font sizing (as in, the fonts need to be able to get huge). Accessibility is also being able to use the interface only with a keyboard, or only with a mouse or specialized controller with 2 buttons.
dagmx 5y ago
How would that work for something that needs to display an image or other media?
pqb 5y ago
Funny you mention that, it reminds the post I have read few seconds ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224197 I am person, who in last few days tried out to use VoiceOver and move responsibility on it to navigate me and read contents, when I could code while I had closed eyes. Ironically the most annoying interface was CLI, because I had to extend my focus on contents of the terminal. Imagine running docker-compose up and you are going to spammed with reading all logs. Next, usually I had problem to find some relative point that I could mark a "milestone" in my head, which will be further point from I will be reading. Also, not all commands are read after executing them. Such command is silly pwd. Everytime I write it down I had to move the VO cursor to read the contents. Also many characters I would recognize as a programmer VO reads differently. Nano editor was complete unusable for me. While in vim I had notable problem to recognize indentations characters (sometimes they are read and sometimes they don't) and to know in what mode am I actually. brew update+upgrade was a nightmare for me. All kind of separators like #### are read as "number", "number" spam. The same situation was with "clear" command. It was read a hundreds of "space", "space", "space"... I was starting to think I am going to the Moon or I play Portal 2 [0]. I could continue writing down my disappointment about the CLI interface that was among my favorites in past but now after this week with VoiceOver I think it is terrible to be blind, because most of time I had to use my eyes to help myself to recognize where I am and what I need to click to move to next element. I was very surprised by the rofi-like find of elements that are on the screen (named as Rotor feature, CapsLock+U). With VO I don't any longer needed to use mouse, which for anybody who has problem with wrists is also a nice thing to consider. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiaxOkyKbDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiaxOkyKbDI

clarkmoody 5y ago

That's right. Accessibility is one of the last things to figure out after all of the other tricky things: proper event handling for sane keyboard navigation, efficient layer clipping / redraw, advanced text layout / style, animations, expanded compatibility across platforms, etc, etc. And then accessibility brings with it the integration with different OSes via disparate APIs, so it will take some effort to offer a cross-platform API to the library user. You'll notice that Iced is not >= 1.0 yet, so you shouldn't expect it to be fully-baked.

resoluteteeth 5y ago
On the one hand that's understandable, but on the other hand it appears to be almost 2 years old already and if people start to actually use it in its current state the lack of accessibility will become problematic.
marcellus23 5y ago
Accessibility seems like the kind of thing that would need to be baked-in from the start right? Bolting on accessibility after everything else has already been built seems like a recipe for a half-assed solution.
- clarkmoody 5y ago
  Luckily large refactors are relatively painless in Rust.

slingnow 5y ago

It's almost like they want to make sure it works for the vast majority of people before they spend time and effort making it work for a much smaller segment of their userbase.

ZenPsycho 5y ago
so they should tackle accessibility (20%) before mac (8%) and linux (2%) support
- nybble41 5y ago
  The odds are good that the fraction of this project's user base—developers writing GUI applications in Rust—who would be interested in Linux support is much more than 2%.
  - ZenPsycho 5y ago
    i thonk you’ve forgotten what the point of developing software is
b3morales 5y ago
Accessibility is not a bolt-on extra feature, it's core to being able to make a product that suits all your users. Everyone needs, or will need, accommodation sometimes. When you have an accident waterskiing and end up on crutches, you'll be glad for the accessibilty of doors that open with a button press. When you poke your eye hiking and need to wear an eyepatch for a few weeks, a screen reader might not seem such a niche use case. These are even kind of extreme examples: frankly, even stuff like dark mode that we take for granted at this point is an accommodation to how some people need or want to use their computers. Migraines are a good example of an (astonishingly) common condition that benefits from flexibility around having to stare at a screen. None of us gets younger as the days go by, either, and that comes with changed needs. I'm still thirty years from retirement and I find that the 10 point font I used to prefer isn't good enough anymore. Bumping up text size is a quotidian action for me and millions of other people. ADDITION: Ah, finally found the quote I was looking for. Maybe not directly relevant, but thought-provoking: > SMS texting was invented [to] figure out a way for deaf people to communicate with one another without speaking. ... Now text messages are universal. https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibility-helps-everyone https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...