Good intentions, but this leads people to create even more apps that they then proudly proclaim are just as accessible as alternatives because of AccessKit. It's a bit of a catch-22.
It's far better that AccessKit exist than that it not.
That being said, yeah, there are people in this very comment section saying that of course egui is accessible, it supports AccessKit. So it's not really theoretical, any attempt to close the gap with AccessKit is going to be used by people as an excuse to build inaccessible applications. That's already happening in this comment section right now.
But that doesn't mean that AccessKit shouldn't exist it's just... one of the downsides to reducing the number of entirely inaccessible apps. It's a partial fix for a bad situation, and it's good for devs to use it if they have to, but it's far better for devs not to need to use it.
I think many people, especially SV devs whose job is finding solutions to problems, forget that there are no solutions to some problems. That only solution to these problems is to not pursue what causes the problem altogether.
Yes, it would be better if web applications that use canvas for their whole UI didn't exist. But they do, and I'm sure there will be more of them. I won't be able to persuade developers to stop developing apps this way. So I have to do what I can to help make them accessible, however imperfectly.
Right; to be clear, my issue is not with AccessKit or really any of the work you're doing here. I'm really happy that AccessKit exists, I'm glad that you're working on it.
AccessKit is trying to help fix a problem as best it can. My issue is with the people and frameworks that are causing the problem.
I think that's less bad than someone losing their job, or failing to get a particular job, because they can't access a canvas-based app. Edit: The former isn't entirely a hypothetical; I know of a blind person who lost his job in 2006 because use of an inaccessible app (a Java applet running on the Microsoft JVM, IIUC) became a requirement. I try to keep that bigger picture in mind with everything I do in AccessKit.
I just wish that the people that make canvas-based web stuff would realise how awful it is and tell people. I’ve interacted with a Flutter web thing once, for something that was only targeting the web. It was very painful. Flutter was completely the wrong tool for the job. But when they advertise their stuff, do they say “look, it kinda supports the web, but if you’re actually trying to target the web, please don’t use this because it’s just not good, and can’t be good unless we rip out the canvas stuff and render to real DOM elements”? Almost never.
