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> a custom mixed immediate/retained library now with rich text and accessibility support. I'm always interested in learning about GUI toolkits that have access

> a custom mixed immediate/retained library now with rich text and accessibility support. I'm always interested in learning about GUI toolkits that have accessibility support. What level of accessibility support does yours have? e.g. does it implement platform accessibility APIs, and if so, on which platforms? Is your library open source? If not, can I see it in action in any commercially available product? Thanks.

kevingadd 4y ago
I haven't found good platform accessibility API bindings for C#, so right now it just has narration support, adjustable text size/contrast, and full keyboard navigation. I'm hoping that later on in my project's development process I'll have the budget to hire someone to try and fully integrate with the platform APIs - it's designed so it will be possible by pushing updates to the retained model. The way it works is that it has an immediate mode API (see https://github.com/sq/Libraries/blob/0ca01d949e3df5fabb1440de3dbc437ae6ccca9c/Squared/PRGUI.Demo/Game.cs#L1334 https://github.com/sq/Libraries/blob/0ca01d949e3df5fabb1440d... for a simple example of the API) and then under the hood it uses a lightweight retained-mode graph, which means that when it's more convenient you can just write more traditional classes and components. In practice most of the UI I've written for my main project is a mix of both models, like for example an editor popup window uses IMGUI-style API while the items in a virtual listbox are represented by a small custom component. It does have a full imgui-style layout engine under the hood instead of doing retained-mode layout, so it's able to fully re-generate layout from scratch every frame, and to minimize page tearing there is a system where components can request a second relayout pass (typically used for things like text autosize). Here's a more complex mixed-mode example from one of my development tools: https://gist.github.com/kg/6a6ba42d5019b546858a2b18751de019 https://gist.github.com/kg/6a6ba42d5019b546858a2b18751de019 Almost all of the on-screen elements in this footage are either immediate-mode or retained-mode UI using the library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey3FtFWxbhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey3FtFWxbhA
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  I think you might like AccessKit [1], once we figure out the best way to provide reasonably efficient .NET bindings. Basically it's an abstraction over the platform accessibility APIs, written in Rust. And it's specifically designed to be usable in immediate-mode GUIs (the first completed toolkit integration was in egui, a Rust immediate-mode GUI). You push tree updates, which can be full or incremental, and AccessKit retains the accessibility tree. [1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

kevingadd 4y ago

I haven't found good platform accessibility API bindings for C#, so right now it just has narration support, adjustable text size/contrast, and full keyboard navigation. I'm hoping that later on in my project's development process I'll have the budget to hire someone to try and fully integrate with the platform APIs - it's designed so it will be possible by pushing updates to the retained model. The way it works is that it has an immediate mode API (see https://github.com/sq/Libraries/blob/0ca01d949e3df5fabb1440de3dbc437ae6ccca9c/Squared/PRGUI.Demo/Game.cs#L1334 https://github.com/sq/Libraries/blob/0ca01d949e3df5fabb1440d... for a simple example of the API) and then under the hood it uses a lightweight retained-mode graph, which means that when it's more convenient you can just write more traditional classes and components. In practice most of the UI I've written for my main project is a mix of both models, like for example an editor popup window uses IMGUI-style API while the items in a virtual listbox are represented by a small custom component. It does have a full imgui-style layout engine under the hood instead of doing retained-mode layout, so it's able to fully re-generate layout from scratch every frame, and to minimize page tearing there is a system where components can request a second relayout pass (typically used for things like text autosize). Here's a more complex mixed-mode example from one of my development tools: https://gist.github.com/kg/6a6ba42d5019b546858a2b18751de019 https://gist.github.com/kg/6a6ba42d5019b546858a2b18751de019 Almost all of the on-screen elements in this footage are either immediate-mode or retained-mode UI using the library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey3FtFWxbhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey3FtFWxbhA

mwcampbell 4y ago
I think you might like AccessKit [1], once we figure out the best way to provide reasonably efficient .NET bindings. Basically it's an abstraction over the platform accessibility APIs, written in Rust. And it's specifically designed to be usable in immediate-mode GUIs (the first completed toolkit integration was in egui, a Rust immediate-mode GUI). You push tree updates, which can be full or incremental, and AccessKit retains the accessibility tree. [1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit