Re:Flutter for Linux
by mwcampbell on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @10:29PM
(#23776412)
About accessibility, you need to find the "Enable accessibility" button and press it first. It's not visible on screen, but you should be able to find it with your screen reader's navigation commands (e.g. swiping left and right on a touch device). Yeah, it kind of sucks that the user has to turn accessibility on, and for that reason alone, I will never willingly develop a web application with Flutter. But at least it does support accessibility.
Right, to be fair I was able to enable the accessibility mode with your instructions. This way, the text content is indeed accessible to a screen reader. However, navigation in any of the demo apps with a screen reader was completely broken. So a user might be able to read a single page but not discover further content. With normal web pages we usually have <a> elements that enable navigation regardless of visual gimmicks.
Flutter for Web further feels like a nightmare for accessibility. I tried enabling the native Google screenreader on my device. It only says "No text found at that location" when I try to read any of the Flutter demo pages in either Chrome or Firefox. In addition to being extremely hostile to people with disabilities, it will soon actually be illegal to build new products with accessibility-hostile tech like Flutter for Web for large parts of the European public and private sector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Accessibility_Act
> we're still in beta
From these viewpoints that feels more like an early alpha product. In 2020 no accessibility support is a non-starter.