[resonious]

This is a good criticism of ImGui, but feels like a false dichotomy. I don't think it's the many layers of DOMs and tree diffing that makes screen readers work well on browsers. Conversely, there's nothing about the ImGui abstraction that makes screen reader support impossible. ImGui already sees all of your text and buttons, so no reason why it couldn't send those to a screen reader as well as the screen.

All in all, I don't think "there is a reason things are the way they are" quite means "the way things are is actually the best they possibly could be".

[jakelazaroff]

Sure, I don’t disagree. Browsers and frameworks are extremely heavy. I do think there’s something to be said for having these affordances on by default. Screen reader support in Dear ImGui isn’t impossible, but that’s a super low bar that puts the onus on developers. Browsers do it out of the box! Our tools should lead us into the “pit of success”, where it’s easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.

I don’t want to get too hung up on Dear ImGui. The official repo says that it’s meant as a developer tool rather than for building end-user UIs, so it’s not a fair comparison. My point is simply that all these things require layers of abstraction. Maybe the way things are isn’t the best way, but even the best-case scenario will be significantly more complex than what you described once you start adding in the things I mentioned.