Let's write a toy UI library
nakst.gitlab.io
nakst.gitlab.io
UI frameworks are one place where outside of toy projects, YAGNI doesn't really apply as much, and so things like focus systems and accessibility affordances should be factored in from day one. If you go in with the attitude of writing something "elegant", you're going to end up bolting these things on after the fact and writing contorted code to make it all fit together. It's like finding out that you need a skyscraper after building foundations and framing for a cottage.
You can avoid this complexity in the base widget class by placing those elsewhere, e.g. FLTK's base widget class[0] is much smaller at around 500 lines of code (+ documentation comments).
[0] https://github.com/fltk/fltk/blob/master/src/Fl_Widget.cxx
Ah, this one:
> That said, you could add a description string to the common element header that screen readers could use, but accessibility concerns are out of scope for this toy UI library.
I love it when tutorials teach people to ignore people like me.
Am I being harsh? Well where's the tutorial that teaches people how to do it properly? Where do people actually learn the right way if not here?
> Am I being harsh? Well where's the tutorial that teaches people how to do it properly? Where do people actually learn the right way if not here?
I would love to read your blog post on how to do so! After all, since you seem to imply that time is free for everyone, you shouldn't have any problem making that blog post.
Or, you know, if you say "This is how you make a UI library" maybe you could think about ... what a USER INTERFACE actually is? Because blind people are users? and we need to interface?
People write tutorials on what they are interested in, what they have knowledge of, and what they want to share.
Accessibility is an important topic, to be sure, and is clearly of particularly high importance to you. Others might complain that they didn't include how to create a high performance table view, or embed an OpenGL view. I think most people, however, will take it as what it is - a well written, helpful contribution.
Your comment specifically asked if you were being harsh, and the consensus appears to be "yes". Perhaps if you worded things differently you might get a different response.
Tactless.
You don't have to make a complete alternative. You can add calls to ATK (accessibility toolkit) on Linux/Unix platforms. I'm not sure what needs to be done on Win32 platforms though.
Primarily because OP actually did call out accessibility as a concern. That is the opposite of teaching the reader to ignore people who use a11y features. Nor is it OP's responsibility to teach their readers anything they don't care to.
And yeah, where are the tutorials you'd like to see? That could have been a more constructive thing for you to share yourself instead of demanding it from no one in particular.
They also didn't include text rendering for scripts that are written right-to-left, nor for scripts that are written vertically, and that affects far more people than those who use screen readers.
Clearly they are not intending to provide a complete and comprehensive course on every aspect of the ideal UI library.
Rather, why don't you make your comment constructive and tell us about accessibility? I am sure there is an "accessibility for noobs" tutorial out there that the rest of us haven't discovered. I, for one, just recently learned about colour blindness in games and was absolutely mad when I saw what the example game in the book looks like to a colour-blind person. Not that I'm much of a designer, but I'll be sure to choose a universally-good colour palette next time I do any UI. So teach us instead of yelling at us.
Well, I guess accessibility is one thing it skipped. It's a huge topic, I admit, so I'm not particularily surprised, but I think a better way for the author of this series would be to promote already existing huge toolkits that do have lots of functionalities built-in, including accessibility, like Qt for example.
That would be good also because already established huge toolkits have already answered a lot of important questions, questions which "modern" GUI toolkits simply ignore. New generations won't even know what we had when we were young.
Imagine wanting to understand how an existing technology works…
Do you walk into a beginner woodworkers class and scoff at them for making yet another birdhouse?