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Comment by bobwaycott | Hacker News Reader

This does not really work for things like tiling window managers on macOS—are you suggesting developers of such tools are up to no good, or are such system-control tools not fitting “normal”?

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If it can’t be done with non-a11y APIs then it doesn’t fit the definition of “things Apple thinks normal app should do,” whether we agree with that or not. The way I see it, and I know it’s a controversial view, if a developer is ok with flaunting the platforms rules about the purpose of an API[1], then what other behavior might they be ok with?

1: The first sentence in Apple’s accessibility API docs[2] is: “Accessible apps help users with disabilities access information and information technology.“ I think they are very clear about the purpose of these, and it’s not “to do cool innovative things missing from the regular API”.

2: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ac...

That's the wrong API.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applicationservice...

Contrary to ryandrake's rule of thumb, window managers are accessibility tools. You could argue that there should be a distinction between accessibility-tools-for-disabled-people and accessibility-tools-that-are-useful-to-everyone, but I'm not convinced such a distiction is useful, especially since Apple would likely try to subvert and destroy the accessibility-tools-that-are-useful-to-everyone, since those conflict with their user-hostile UI design, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21828816 alludes to with:

> I think they are very clear about the purpose of these, and it's not "to do cool innovative things missing from the regular API".

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