nice point, people like to shit on the web but it has one of the biggest accessibility features that most of the gui frameworks would just leave them as feature suggestions for years

I'd note that as stuff like A11y gets added into something like Discord, we'll see the app slowly bloat up to compensate.

Google Chrome generally used around 25mb per tab in 2010. Today, that number is often 500mb or even 1gb.

Would you really need 500mb for accessibility? Can't text to speech be outsourced to the OS or companion app?

And Windows apps had accessibility before computers had 25MB RAM in total. Accessibility is not the cause of bloat.

do any of these native GUI libraries provide just as rich accessibility experiences to disabled people?

If we mean native as in OS-specific GUI APIs built-in to the operating system, then yes. All of the browsers are abstractions on top of that. If we mean cross-platform GUI libraries for Rust I think your choices are like Tauri (which is a webview), Slint, and maybe Fltk with extensions?

Yes, yes they do. WXDragon for Rust, for example, provides quite good accessibility. And maybe accessibility would be better for frameworks like QT or DearImGUI if (1) people didn't act like the web was some paragon of accessibility (hint: it really, really isn't, not when websites misuse web APIs -- which happens quite frequently) and (2) UI framework developers didn't just make a UI framework that looked sexy but left accessibility on the floor.

What's oddly being ignored in this entire thread (so far, as of the time of writing) is that back in 2017-2018 Discord was an Electron app and was completely inaccessible. The web did not magically bring accessibility to the table -- we disabled people had to go yell at Discord to fix their shit, and even then it took them like 2-3 years, and even now Discord has some very very weird accessibility issues that will randomly crop up here and there.

The article implies that a11y will exist on launch and maybe already is.

And it doesn't require that huge amount of RAM, no. What requires the Chrome RAM is running JavaScript and do it fast, and a lot of extremely complicated features, most of which a single app will never use.

This is mostly because websites have gotten heavier and we want them to run faster.

How much of that is due to chrome, and how much is because say Jira and YouTube are incredibly bloated?

All the native APIs across major platforms have accessibility features, how do you think browsers implement theirs?

i switched a cross platform application TO web stack for this reason. accessibility and screen reader usability is incredibly important and massively overlooked in many domains

Already done. Windows has builtin font scaling capability, gtk has text only scaling.

The Windows settings scale resources for the OS, not per application. The more applications you use, the worse these settings become. If I'm unable to use an application's own features to modify the size of something in its UI, I have to fall back to the Windows settings. That leads to the following:

1. Use the make everything bigger/font size settings to increase the size of what I currently can't see

2. Restart

3. Open every application I need, and go through every major feature in each of them to determine if I can still see things comfortably, while making sure no elements have exploded in size as this also leads to usability problems

4. If not, go to 1

I have to do this every time I install a new application, or one of them updates and changes their UI or decides to opt into the Windows accessibility settings. The latter one happened a few years ago with Firefox, and cost me a day to sort.