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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

I was recently shopping for cross-platform desktop GUI toolkits, and discovered that there are really very few options that work well with screen readers. The only ones that seemed at all viable were Electron and JavaFX.

.NET MAUI also seems very promising, and I like that they're actively blogging about it[1], but it hasn't been officially released yet.

Anyway, it seemed to me that basically all the others either aren't accessible at all, or are only accessible on one or two of the target platforms, or have long-standing accessibility bugs that seem like they would render the UI unusable.

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/the-journey-to-access...

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Does QT not work with screen readers?

According to the information I was able to gather, it seemed that the answer to that question depends on whether you ask Qt, or a visually impaired user of Qt applications.

I decided the latter opinion was the one I cared more about.

I'm admittedly trying to play it very safe. I have zero proficiency with screen readers, so I'm not really able to independently verify any of this. All I know is that the GUI toolkit is one of the most expensive things to have to change later, so I want to be as close as I can possibly be to 100% sure that I won't end up in a situation where my projects have accessibility issues that I can't fix without changing the GUI toolkit.

Thank you very much for taking the time to research toolkit accessibility and being willing to make it a deciding factor. Which toolkit did you go with?

From what I've read, JavaFX apparently has its own accessibility problems; for instance, I vaguely remember reading that if you used Alt+Tab to switch to or from a JavaFX window, JavaFX would automatically activate the menu bar. I've never used a real JavaFX-based app though.

As much as some of us might dislike it, I think the safest choice is Electron, or just making it a web app if that's an option.

> I've never used a real JavaFX-based app though.

Neither have I; from what I can tell, the only place that JavaFX seems to have a foothold still is "intro to software engineering" classes in colleges.

> "intro to software engineering" classes in colleges

That's not nothing. Blind students need to be able to participate in those classes.

Oh, to be clear I don't disagree at all. I'm all for making this stuff more approachable.

I chose Electron, largely because there seemed to be a lot more good documentation on how to maintain a decent level of accessibility.

Electron does have its downsides. On the upside, one nice thing about making screen reader support non-negotiable is that it took so many options off the table. So I was at no risk of analysis paralysis, and I don't have to worry about second-guessing my decision.

The basics work, however for example screen readers do not anounce context menus under Windows, treeviews are not providing all the information they could see (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-81874?jql=text%20~%20%...), etc. But in the end, if you need somewhat more advanced widgets (tables etc.) and you do not want to implement the gui on each platform or use Electron or similar, you have no choice.

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