I haven’t messed with Tauri, but I’m not very hopeful. My best case scenario right now is for Discord to continue upstream accessibility work. To be clear, there is an edit for GPUI, but it still seems to be in early stages.
Speaking of framework maturity, last I looked at OBS on Qt6 it still had significant issues. You need the OS accessibility API, the framework to hook into it and the developer knowledge on how to leverage that. It’s a lot of ifs that can fail early.
Thanks for answering. Trying to keep my software as accessible as possible with regards to colors and structure, but screen readers are a bit beyond my competency.
The first step is to make sure it’s keyboard accessible, since that’s how blind people will use your software. Tab, arrows, space, enter should get you to most things and trigger controls. Ctrl + tab for some things, F6 typically moves focus between panes.
Apart from that, you can always turn on your own screen reader. Windows comes with Narrator, macOS with VoiceOver and most Linux distros will come with Orca. Mind you, you’ll have to learn a lot and the fact you can’t do something doesn’t mean an experienced screen reader user can’t, but you’ll get some feedback pretty quickly.
That’s actually an excellent point. I can just use the text-to-speech screen reader, and the same content will go to a physical screen reader. I’ll try that!
Fun! I’ll get to moderate a Discord server for blind people that blind people can’t use on desktop!
How would a rewrite cause this to happen? Is there something about Rust frameworks for the desktop that exclude accessibility features?
I’ve been working primarily with C#, but none of their frameworks exclude accessibility features… would be shocked AF if Rust frameworks just left that all out.
Yeah, but this is Rust, not some single-dev pet project. You would expect a fully fleshed out framework to have accessibility features built in as first-class features, not some randomly bolted-on afterthought.
It’s not about Rust, it’s about GPUI, which was developed for the Zed text editor. Go look at the repos for both and you’ll notice they only started considering accessibility at all after blind people opened tickets and they only added the very basic infrastructure required when a blind developer took it open himself to do it.
Fun! I’ll get to moderate a Discord server for blind people that blind people can’t use on desktop!
Seriously, anything on GPUI reads as “empty window” to screen readers.
Well that sucks. Do you know if Tauri is any better in that regard?
Unrelated to Rust, I assume Qt6 has the expected accessibility features wired?
I haven’t messed with Tauri, but I’m not very hopeful. My best case scenario right now is for Discord to continue upstream accessibility work. To be clear, there is an edit for GPUI, but it still seems to be in early stages.
Speaking of framework maturity, last I looked at OBS on Qt6 it still had significant issues. You need the OS accessibility API, the framework to hook into it and the developer knowledge on how to leverage that. It’s a lot of ifs that can fail early.
Thanks for answering. Trying to keep my software as accessible as possible with regards to colors and structure, but screen readers are a bit beyond my competency.
The first step is to make sure it’s keyboard accessible, since that’s how blind people will use your software. Tab, arrows, space, enter should get you to most things and trigger controls. Ctrl + tab for some things, F6 typically moves focus between panes.
Apart from that, you can always turn on your own screen reader. Windows comes with Narrator, macOS with VoiceOver and most Linux distros will come with Orca. Mind you, you’ll have to learn a lot and the fact you can’t do something doesn’t mean an experienced screen reader user can’t, but you’ll get some feedback pretty quickly.
That’s actually an excellent point. I can just use the text-to-speech screen reader, and the same content will go to a physical screen reader. I’ll try that!
How would a rewrite cause this to happen? Is there something about Rust frameworks for the desktop that exclude accessibility features?
I’ve been working primarily with C#, but none of their frameworks exclude accessibility features… would be shocked AF if Rust frameworks just left that all out.
I checked the gpui crate and it has an accessibility module that uses AccessKit, but I can’t say if it actually works.
Yeah, but this is Rust, not some single-dev pet project. You would expect a fully fleshed out framework to have accessibility features built in as first-class features, not some randomly bolted-on afterthought.
It’s not about Rust, it’s about GPUI, which was developed for the Zed text editor. Go look at the repos for both and you’ll notice they only started considering accessibility at all after blind people opened tickets and they only added the very basic infrastructure required when a blind developer took it open himself to do it.
“Bolted on” didn’t even begin to tell the story.
The programming language has absolutely nothing to do with the size or maturity of a GUI library using it.
Without knowing what framework is in use its hard to say. Hell electron had accessibilty issues for a while
they literally explained the problem in the second sentence of their comment: