I think ZenPsycho is right calling out for accessibility features. It's unfortunate that most low-key UI libraries don't support them, partly because those OS API are so complex and for a non-user it is hard to understand them (much like for English users it is sometimes hard to understand what's needed for localization).
A pragmatic way to see it - and arguably it's an issue I don't have answer for - is that the sum of all desirable modern features (incl. but not limited to accessibility features) are growing the scope so complex and large it is also - very unfortunately - hindering innovation. Everyone agrees accessibility features are desirable. Yet if every experimental or hobbyist project needed to implement all accessibility features, those projects wouldn't exist. So two steps forward is costing us one step back here :(. There are _so many things_ dear imgui doesn't do at this point, it can't handle full internationalization and right-to-left text. Maybe it'll catch up. Maybe other solutions will solve this. For now as I don't have the resources to do it all myself. But the more people use and work with a given software the more likely it is to evolve and improve. I would gladly surrender to a much better product than dear imgui that implemented this while also solving the problems dear imgui aims to solve.
Any internal tool or debug GUI has reasonable odds of becoming a user-facing tool eventually, and it's a matter of time until you end up needing to support staff/customers in territories with RTL languages or ideographic character sets. At that point, you end up regretting most of the corners you cut.
I built lots of internal developer tools for a mid-sized western studio and it wasn't long until I had to go back and patch in a bunch of localization support because it turned out the publishers overseas needed to be able to use it and not all of their staff spoke English. Any blind employees were probably completely out of luck (maybe not, I did use Win32.)
Where do you draw the line? Some companies are using it for polished large tooling which may have thousands of end-users. Those users will eventually want a solution to tackle that.
Until HR/regulations/compassion hits you, please don't comment please.
Got it though - these things are perceived as - meh, why would I need it - I have perfect vision, two hands, can speak, can hear, can touch, etc. And then you start realizing you maybe working with folks with disabilities, and the same products/apps that you are working with allow them to do so (like Visual Studio), so on one hand it's easy to ignore them (without even realizing so), but once you've become aware of what they are facing, and seen enough it makes you think - should I use this, because there is no native control, and usually native controls have ways to be decoded by Assistive tech (my reasons back in the days to prefer wxWidgets over Qt), or recently even if it's non-native (Qt, flutter, etc) it can feed to the assistive sdk (say on Windows) details of what's going on in the control.
It's rather important! It's not just a gimmick. It shows compassion, love, and someone might already a project doing so with "Dear IMGUI" (not aware of one), but probably internals can be exposed in some fashion.
The problem is that accessibility APIs are very limited and stagnated in every single OS (except maybe Apple).
For basic default widgets accessibility works out-of-the-box, but as soon as you want to do something more complex or do custom drawing like Dear ImGui does, you're forced to write WAY more code than anticipated.
In Windows, for example, you need significantly more code to get a11y than to draw a custom widget. If you're drawing to a framebuffer like Dear ImGui is doing, it's even worse. In some OSs have to use other APIs (like focus management) to take advantage of the a11y APIs, which is kind of "at odds" with the whole immediate-GUI paradigm.
This is amazing new for corporation-backed products like Flutter, React Native or even Qt, because it makes the barriers to entry way higher. On the other hand, open source project will lack the resources to do proper native a11y.
Asking OS vendors to have proper accessibility in their OSs is IMO the more appropriate step for accessibility advocates, rather than forcing dozens of Open Source projects to reimplement the same thing over and over.
> Asking OS vendors to have proper accessibility in their OSs is IMO the more appropriate step for accessibility advocates
What more should OS vendors do? Is there anything OS vendors could do that would actually help the state of accessibility in fringe GUI toolkits like Dear ImGui? This isn't a rhetorical question. In addition to being an outspoken accessibility advocate on threads like this one, I'm currently a developer on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft, which owns the UI Automation API among other things, and I want to know what more we should be doing.
For a small developer I believe the whole topic seems quite overwhelming. To attract fringe GUI toolkits it would be useful to provide easy-to-chew accessibility samples based over 3d graphics technology (say: take a DirectX11 samples drawing a few text and buttons and make it accessibility compliant).
That's a fair request. All of the full-featured accessibility implementations are buried in complex UI frameworks and browser engines. I'm also aware that the sample UIA provider implementations in the Windows SDK aren't very useful; they all implement a single control in its own HWND, using GDI or GDI+.
As part of Microsoft's Hack for Good program, I worked with the developers of the Quorum language and development environment (https://quorumlanguage.com/) on their UIA implementation. So I know how frustrating it can be for a non-expert to implement UIA, and how easy it is to get it wrong.
I'll have to see what I can do about implementing a better sample.
Just better documentation, tutorials and samples would improve the situation 100x! The current ones are hard even for veteran native programmers.
Next thing I'd love to see would be a simplified API to allow smaller developers to also use it. As it is, only giant companies can afford handling accessibility.
A personal wish would be to have an immediate mode imperative API for accessibility that abstracts the Automation Tree. Similar to how Dear ImGui does. Something like: BeginFrame, TextInput, Checkbox, EndFrame, etc... plus some commands to "ask" if the Automation API wants to do something, like moving to the next control. Maybe a Dear ImAccessibility?
This would work perfectly for Video Games and would allow accessibility to added even to games that didn't predict it. Games are pretty simple, and don't require too much variety. I worked in an Adventure Game in the past and it would be 100% playable using A11y with something like that. I would love to make a 100% accessible game in the future.
This of course could be a simple multi-platform wrapper instead of something from your team.