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jchwtoday at 1:10 PM3 repliesview on HN

When I was at Google, I'd periodically test our (internal-only) app with Chromevox with the display off. It's not that it sounded like it would be easy, but it really is a challenge, and I can only imagine the muscle memory built up over time of trying to work around accessibility bugs and strange behaviors.

Unfortunately it seems impossible to get all that much funding for accessibility work :/ I wonder what ever happened to the Newton accessibility bus intended to supplement Wayland...


Replies

embedding-shapetoday at 3:10 PM

> I wonder what ever happened to the Newton accessibility bus intended to supplement Wayland...

Hm, never heard about it, but now I'm wondering too. I just finished implementing proper accessibility support for my native app toolkit for Linux, macOS and Windows, but only done it for X11 so far, I was just gonna get started with Wayland. What is the accessibility story on Wayland, couldn't people rely on the same protocols as with X11? That was my impression, but haven't really dig into yet.

kridsdale1today at 2:46 PM

I’ve worked at Apple Facebook and Google. Apple was the only one that made a11y bugs and a face to face consultation with a blind developer to show you how your app sucked, mandatory before you could launch.

miki123211today at 2:53 PM

The muscle memory build-up is definitely real.

There are apps I use semi-regularly that less-experienced screen reader users thought were inaccessible, and I couldn't even explain what they were doing wrong from memory. The ways of working around accessibility issues are just so ingrained in me that all I can usually remember is "yeah I did this somehow, but it was six months ago and I have absolutely no idea which specific tricks I needed for this one."