[mwcampbell]

> 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.

[ocornut]

Hello Matt,

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).

[mwcampbell]

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.

[ratww]

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.

[flohofwoe]

This would also drastically improve the accessibility situation for games!