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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

Accessibility bridging between .NET MAUI and Avalonia is currently limited.

Nowhere near production ready, got it.

This is the first preview release. It’s targeting a preview of .NET 11, which should help you understand that it’s not intended to be used in production right now.

We don’t expect this to graduate from a preview until November. There’s plenty of time to sort out Accessibility.

A question I'm sure you might have been asked before - will this support mobile too? It would be nice if it did. I would certainly like to try it. It does feel like being able to use Avalonia and MAUI in mobile would be extremely beneficial.

Almost nobody needs accessibility; let's be realistic, it's obviously not a priority. The priority is to put this out the door (MVP style).

this was down voted but its correct. even if as a human j disagree and it sounds mean, this is how people think in general..too bad, but too true. accessibility will come after 'launch'.

If they mean "only a small subset of your users need accessibility support" this might be true, but I haven't worked for a organization selling software in the past 20+ years that hasn't needed to provide support, and those orgs are the audience for a .net cross-platform UI solution, so in that case they are wrong; almost everyone "needs accessibility support".

provide support on a product and accessibility are really different things.

accessibility is like implementing braille and things for deaf and colourblind etc.

support is resetting password and helping with accounts etc.

so one is to get a certain category of users to be able to access your site in the general sense. the other (support) is about helping people who already can access your site or service.

> accessibility is like implementing braille and things for deaf and colourblind etc.

- larger fonts

- Better contrast controls,

- Non abstract art iconography,

- larger buttons and keyboard navigation,

- understanding that there are many types of colourblindness with different requriements,

- the ability to set lightmode on your app and website due to the issues reading text for anyone with astigmatisms,

- reducing the amount of animation or motion blur

The range of what accessibility is isn't small and some of it is going to be required for the vast majority of products. Also accessibility requirements change over time. eyes and hearing degrade. the desire to waste energy trying to find some stylish button that has no border and almost no contrast to indicate where it is goes away

sure, its much more likely even than your examples too...

was there a point you wanted to make or did you just want to elaborate on what accessibility means? im sure google can churn up tons more examples if u need em....

Unfortunately too many developers share your perspective. I'd be surprised if anyone building commercial software would move ahead without accessibility support though because, 1. it's required by law in many situations, and 2. it makes good business sense.

> 2. it makes good business sense.

What expected ROI are you basing this on? If it made good business sense on its own, it wouldn't be required by law.

It doesn't actually make good business sense to prioritize accessibility. The simple fact that it is required by law is proof: if it was more profitable to bake in accessibility features, then you wouldn't need to require it, companies would do it on their own without being pushed.

Accessibility isn't a binary, though. Without any level of accessibility, your software is innaccesible/unusable and your MVP is DBA.

Sadly accessibility often lands at the bottom of priorities because developers mostly don't care. Yet, it's relatively straight forward to implement in most modern systems if you start building it with that in mind. Similarly, adding i18n to an application as an afterthought requires more effort than if you would have done it from the start.

Accessibility doesn't only mean easing access to your application to people with disabilities. Accessibility makes it also easier for people with temporary or situational impairment to use your software. A simple example that comes to mind is single finger zooming on map applications, where you tap once and then hold-swipe up/down to zoom in/out, which makes it easy to be used with one hand. I know it's difficult to relate to people with permanent disabilities, but we can definitely relate to situational ones where we wish something was easier to use with one hand because the other was busy. Now imagine if it's the only way you can ever use it :-)

Ultimately, it leaves out no one and benefits everyone.

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