Comment by cosmic_cheese
14 hours ago
Keyboard accessibility is one of those things that tends to get swept under the rug or forgotten about entirely alongside accessibility in general. The funny thing is that the former usually falls out of the latter.
Part of the blame lands on the shoulders of popular UI frameworks (or in the case of those choosing to eschew use of such, the developers who made that choice). The older frameworks tend to make this fairly easy; for example, in Cocoa/AppKit (Mac native UI framework), one can pretty easily wire up their entire UI for proper keyboard navigation entirely visually (mostly just consists of connecting nextKeyView outlet between controls to produce a logical chain to tab-focus through). Defining key shortcuts is also simple; add a menu item for a command and set its corresponding shortcut (which in turn allows the user to rebind the shortcut in System Settings at will).
That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.
Funny that you bring macOS, because for _decades_ I've struggled with navigating it without a keyboard. Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible
As a system macOS definitely has some holes in keyboard navigation, as well as a couple corners which are KB-navigable but the way to focus them is not immediately obvious.
On the app level, keyboard navigability depends on the developer. If they take the time to dot their I's and cross their T's it's between decent and great, but if they don't care it'll be bad.
MacOS has intentional holes in keyboard support. You have to go into settings and turn on a config for keyboard navigation to reach all elements. Apple intends for most users to navigate with a mouse.
It’s in the accessibility settings.
https://support.apple.com/en-za/guide/mac-help/mchlc06d1059/...
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"Some holes"? That's an understatement.
There's no option to bring up a context menu with the keyboard. And there are no keyboard accelerators _AT_ _ALL_. Windows will underline the shortcut characters when you hold "alt".
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To reinforce your point, by default on macOS you can't use Tab to select different options in a dialog box. You have to enable that in System Settings -> Keyboard -> "Keyboard navigation" which is off by default.
My theory is that Mac was born with a mouse while Windows (and Windows apps) originally had to function on machines that might not have one. Thus, keyboard navigablity was prioritized, and that design sensibility stuck around longer.
I think it probably has more to do with Mac's lack of adoption by the US Government and large corporations.
Microsoft took accessibility of Windows and apps as a basic requirement. The fact that Windows is the daily driver desktop for the staff of the regulatory agencies that would bring complaints would not have gone unnoticed.
But really, why wouldn't you? You almost get it for free if you use the standard widgets, and smooth keyboard navigation is far faster for experienced users than having to repeatedly move one's hand between keyboard and mouse.
You would be baffled to know that after the creation of the mouse, Steve Jobs wanted to remove the arrow keys so developers would be forced to create mouse only interfaces.
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> Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible
Bing, Bing, Bing! I came here to vent how the new windows 10 and windows 11 interfaces (made by Mac enthusiasts, ughh) have omitted keyboard accessibility for a cleaner look. They also dropped drag and drop support (which I never knew about in windows 7) and I completely missed how useful it could be on Windows 10/11.
For whatever it's worth, the new W10/11 designs aren't in line with traditional Mac design philosophies either. They're more in line with those of iOS and Android with how they tend to bury and omit options entirely and prefer massive whitespace.
Tons of built in winui3 stuff is still very accessible by the keyboard, metro era though what pretty rough.
> That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.
This is even more visible when using Apple’s own apps on macOS. Choose any of them that have been ported from iOS without any attention to detail or any QA for accessibility, like Reminders or Settings or Notes or another app. The tab key will not take you where you might expect. There is no way to navigate only using common keyboard shortcuts. Nobody working on all these Apple apps have heard of tab order or keyboard based navigation.
>That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.
Which ones, besides web frameworks pretending to be desktop ones? Most if not all frameworks I know support keyboard navigation.
I know of at least 5 different UI frameworks in different languages which are partially accessible or completely inaccessible. Some include Dlangui, Tkinter (although this is getting better), DearImGui... Really any UI that decides to draw it's widgets by frame. QT also has some accessibility problems. In apps made with any of these, they are either impossible to use with assistive technology (and therefore the keyboard) or they are very difficult to use.
Dlangui is so niche that I am amazed to even see it here. DearImGui is intended for thowing together some slap-dash UI widgets for debugging things like interactive rendering.
Do Qt built-in widgets have huge problems? Inwould assume that custom widgets invariably do because approximately nobody writes any accessibility handling for them.
It's not even in consideration anymore since the plaque of electron swept over desktop apps.
Are there any modern cross-platform GUI frameworks that do this well?
Unfortunately, the intersection between “modern” and “do this well” is pretty much the empty set.