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by foepys 2942 days ago
I'm always concerned that accessibility is being left behind. Android and iOS both put great efforts into making their UI accessible, why do the work again? Chances are that the accessibility of those third-party components will be worse or maybe doesn't even work at all.
1 comments

The problem is that the accessibility work already needs to be done on every platform (for now we have two really popular ones but nobody can be sure what the future brings).

Also, if you could just recompile your app for a new platform and release (more or less), it would remove the biggest barrier to entry for possible new platforms: Adoption.

That's not what I meant. Android and iOS already have their own widgets with accessibility features in place. iOS even better than Android. It took years for them to develop to where they are now.

Now Flutter is making its own widgets that look and handle like the corresponding native widgets. So they need to implement accessibility all over again in the same way that is already present on the platforms. Google is thus redoing all the work they already did in Android.

A lesson from modern software development is that software is developed incrementally and because accessibility is never high on those priority lists, it will lack in quality at first and take multiple iterations to get up to the same level as the native accessibility of the OS, if it even gets there in the first place.

I think accessibility was a requirement for an internal google flutter app, have you had a chance to look at https://flutter.io/accessibility/