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Looks really nice! I used to work in the Medical Device, Bio Tech & consumer device space (~10 years ago), good toolkits for building embedded interactive UIs
by samwillis 3y ago
Looks really nice!
I used to work in the Medical Device, Bio Tech & consumer device space (~10 years ago), good toolkits for building embedded interactive UIs were few and far between. The idea of having one codebase for both an embedded UI on a low spec device and for a mobile app is really compelling.
I could see a dev kit, based on an existing dev-board and screen, running JS with bindings to this, as a great way to do rapid prototyping and development. Then being able to take that and optimise down to lower cost production hardware.
As with all these toolkits, when it comes to the web and doing rendering via a HTML Canvas you end up with accessibility problems. Not though a fault of not considering it, but its not something you have to consider for an embedded device at all (or you do but it's built from scratch for that specific device). Unfortunately the APIs are just not there yet on the web platform to open up accessibly of these sort of UIs.
I suspect the key selling point of the web version is building demos and simulators for design validation. It makes it super easy to distribute to projects stakeholders and focus groups. We did something in that area for an early version of the UI for the first version of the Bosch Robot Lawnmower, we had demo hardware on the mower, and a UI simulator written in JS. Both used the same custom built UI specification system, so we could iterate the design and demo it via the web, then built it into the embedded software for the hardware prototypes.
- ogoffart 3y agoThank you for your feedback! We are aware of the issue regarding accessibility when rendering via HTML Canvas on the web platform. Our web version of Slint is mainly, as you guessed, designed for demo purposes. While it would be possible to write a backend that uses the DOM, we haven't done it yet because our focus is currently on embedded and desktop.
- mwcampbell 3y agoAt some point I'm planning to work on a web backend for AccessKit. I know that creating a parallel DOM for canvas-based web applications doesn't solve all accessibility problems, but it'll at least be better than nothing.