That gives you a distinct accessibility tree in the DOM, which is kinda dumb as an approach. One of the reasons for going pure-canvas on the web was supposed to be performance (I don’t think it was ever true, though—only if comparing with a bad DOM implementation), and if you have to enable this accessibility DOM, you’re guaranteeing you’re doing double work. And no, on the web you can’t just do it when you need it: you can’t poll if it’s needed. All you can do in that case is to present screen reader users with a “this page is currently empty, press this button to unbreak it” button. (Aside: I’ve seen that done once. And the button was broken.)

But the problems we’re talking about are far broader than “does my screen reader work”. Do my links work properly—Ctrl+Click, middle-click, long press, hover? (This one is fixable with only mild compromise. Those that follow are not.) Does my text render correctly? Can I select it and use my browser’s context menu or other similar tools? Does content scroll properly, at correct rates, with correct inertia, without jank or at least a frame’s latency? It’s these sorts of things that Flutter’s pure-canvas approach cannot fix, and they affect, in smaller ways, a lot more people.

I’ve written more specifically about the problems here on HN quite a few times. Search and you’ll find ’em. I really should get down to writing a detailed article about it all at some point… it’s been quite a few years.