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Comment by zigzag312

8 hours ago

Is there any technical limitation that accessibility support is usually lacking in immediate mode GUIs? Or it's just a lot of work?

Flutter, which does its own rendering of controls, needs to implement a lot of accessibility features by itself.

Just shooting from the hip, it's a lot of work, but even more importantly it's running slightly counter to the core motive behind many immediate mode GUI toolkits, which is to be as minimalist and easy to work with as possible.

For my part I have some accessibility needs that typically aren't well supported by immediate mode GUIs. And my personal take is, this is 100% fine. If you're working on a thing where an immediate mode GUI toolkit is even a realistic option, you're probably also in a situation where it's exceedingly unlikely that making your hobby project or prototype or whatever harder to work on will cause a net increase in humanity's overall sense of wellbeing.

And if something comes up and you do end up needing to make changes for someone else's benefit, hey, good news, immediate mode GUIs are really, really easy to hack on.

'a lot of work' is probably an understatement. one of the reasons everybody embeds browsers nowadays is all the text rendering quirks (e.g. right-to-left) are solved - and some of it includes accessibility (like easy theming, scaling, aria, screen reader support, etc.) browsers spent a lot of resources to make this happen.