SixtyFPS Becomes Slint (opens in new tab)

I’m surprised by how much progress we’ve made in this area. I used to make android apps circa 2013-15. Accessibility was an afterthought, a nice to have.

Reading the SwiftUI docs in 2022, it’s front and centre. They tutorial covers accessibility soon after “hello world”. Every module of the tutorial has a section on setting the right accessibility info, rather than a single, optional accessibility tutorial. It makes me happy that doing the right thing is the default.

I’m planning on making a small productivity app just for myself, but it’ll be 100% accessible simply because they’ve made it so easy.

> a UI toolkit that doesn’t have even basic accessibility bindings is basically illegal to use for commercial products in multiple major countries now

Any sources for that? I've never seen such a claim outside of Hacker News. A quick Google search i did about it only shows some court cases in U.S. (and in those cases it seems to be up to the judge with many failing). The closest is a requirement from EU in 2018 that web sites by the member states' government (ie. it is only for government web sites) has to be accessible. That makes sense, but it only covers government web sites specifically, not any other use for a toolkit (e.g. desktop apps) or even private sites.

Flutter does handle accessibility on the web, but not very well. You need to press a button hidden from non-screenreader users and then Flutter will make a tree of dummy elements with aria attributes that let you use the app. You can see this if you use a screenreader or your browser of choice's accessibility tree inspector on the demo app.

Sure - that's the approach Google have taken with Docs, which switched to canvas-based rendering last year (https://thenewstack.io/google-docs-switches-to-canvas-render...). It's definitely not for the faint of heart though.

A screenreader doesn’t literally read the screen, it reads the accessibility tree that apps build for their interfaces. If your user interface kit doesn’t create an accessibility tree then your users’ screenreaders are completely lost at sea.

Yeah the problem isn't nearly as pronounced for rust, since rustup exists and rust itself isn't really available on any platforms you can't just update the toolchain yourself.

C++ has a lot more tangled dependencies going on especially when you're stuck with a vendor's compiler.

Make no mistake: the problem here isn't necessarily technological.

C++ the language also has pretty strong backwards compatibility. It's also trivial to install a new Clang version on most systems. But it certain spaces that's not what matters. Maybe you are only allowed to use That One Certified Compiler from 15 years ago and getting a certification for a newer compiler is not feasible. Or maybe you're on a system where the C++ standard library is part of the system and so you cannot use newer language features because that would require raising the minimum required OS version (I remember that some parts of the C++ standard library are not available if you compile for older macOS versions, for example).

the "Direct X" one looks like an artist picking a "high-tech" name from a software framework.

Slint is the other way around, if anything.

It's a classic.