[charcircuit]

>A screenreader doesn’t literally read the screen

Why not? The approach of creating an accessibility tree can take extra work from developers instead of it just working. It's convenient to be able to just use an image without writing alt text for it. For example in a group chat.

[robin_reala]

An image on its own: sure, our tech is getting pretty good at recognising the contents. An image in context? Almost impossible to tell whether it’s meant to be decorative, inspirational, factual, or to be OCRed for text without some sort of hint.

Or what about a chart, or an assembly or measurement diagram? Can current image recognition reliably reproduce that information?

At the end of the day, the extra work by developers is part of what it means to be a developer. If you’re not doing that work then is the end product really meeting your users’ needs?

[charcircuit]

A screen reader could be made to describe those things. Even if it failed I don't see how it could be worse than it just saying that there is an image there.

[marcellus23]

> The approach of creating an accessibility tree can take extra work from developers instead of it just working.

Because this isn’t true unless you’re using a nonnative framework like Flutter. If you write your apps in HTML or native frameworks, the tree is built automatically. You only have to fiddle with it if you’re doing really custom stuff (which almost no one is).

[charcircuit]

The project that is being linked to renders everything into a canvas. It's extra work to create a separate tree for another program to digest.

[marcellus23]

You asked why not. That's the answer -- why should platforms create an overcomplicated ML-based solution to try to screen read (assuming such a thing is even possible, which I don't believe it is), when existing solutions using standard frameworks work fine and _don't_ require devs to spend extra time?