Comment by miki123211

It's very hard to make a TUI (or a web app) that has 0 screen reader accessibility. It's also much harder to make a TUI that has great screen reader accessibility (it's much easier for web apps). "native" apps are a much wider spectrum.

With a TUI or a web app, screen readers will always have some access, because no matter what you do, the text layer is always there. This may not be enough accessibility to use the app or to complete some specific workflow, but a screen reader user will at least have a rough idea of what's going on. For web apps, that's a good basis to start from once you finally realize that accessibility is something you need.

Desktop apps are much more of a mixed bag. Most frameworks draw their UI themselves, basically pixel by pixel, instead of using some text-based platform primitives. If your framework doesn't expose UI semantics to the OS, a screen reader user gets absolutely nothing, basically a blank window with no visible content or controls. If you're just a developer using that framework, it's a very difficult situation to get out of, once a11y becomes a business requirement.

GTK on anything but Linux is the major offender these days, so are many niche Rust frameworks and anything involving game or game-like UI. QT, Java Swing and Flash used to be this way historically.