Accessible Rust gui framework
Hi folks,
as you may possibly know, I am a Rust fan, with this language being one of my primary languages.
But along all Rust's amazing features, which would take a whole article to name, there is one thing I am quite worried about.
That thing is Rust guis' accessibility.
I have tried few of them in recent time, and really, none of them was accessible in any way.
Gtk-rs seemed promising, as gtk has already some of its atk stuff implemented on Windows, there are even Rust crates for atk, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work at all, and my issue opened on atk-rs' Github page was unanswered.
Orbtk is a framework originally written for Redox os, an operating system written completely in Rust, but it has cross-platform ambitions as well. With electron as its background on Windows, I hoped, that I could get at least accessible html out of it, what would be definitely better than nothing. But guess what, it has its own rendering engine, so I was out of luck again. I wonder if author of Redox os thought at least once about accessibility for the system, I'm afraid I know the answer.
Azul framework, seemed quite promising with its web backend, but it's currently uncompillable.
Druid, seemed quite nice for its build time, but there were no accessibility again.
Fltk, this was the framework I most wished to get working. Although it isn't a pure Rust thing, it is a cross platform gui library, which is written to be small, includable as one static library, available on all platforms. When packed with .exe file, resulting binary hardly passes 1 mb, and doesn't need any dlls or big setup to compile, unlike qt, wx or gtk, which are mess to even get compiled, and after compilation they add tons of files, which need to be shipped with the program.
I have started accessibility discussion on Fltk's forums. They are quite willing to do something about it, if it was possible for them, but sadly I don't have enough accessibility knowledge yet to give them suggestions other than implementing system's accessibility apis, what as you can imagine isn't really helpful for someone, who possibly never heard about accessibility at all.
Do you have experiences with other frameworks for Rust, which I could try? Of course, an ideal would be small, non-invasive easy to compile crossplatform accessible gui framework, with Rustic code.
But I'm not that naive to believe, that something like that for Rust actually exists, so instead, the question is, is there an accessible gui framework for Rust at all?
It would be best, if it was able to ship as an application. It doesn't matter whether it will be backed with some library or Rust's wasm with some electron-like interpreter, but there should be one .exe file, which would launch the thing, or at least .html file, if nothing else would work.
Infact, I don't have a good feeling about this whole situation. Rust is a relatively new language with great potential, so one could expect, that with the new generation, when programs are no longer written in assembly, or with few kilobytes of ram, things could move for us as well, as there is much more space for it, unlike in times of DOS or first Windows versions, which have influence even today.
But for now, it seems like the exact opposite, with web as the only thing being accessible, because that was done already, and some people are talented enough to break that as well. If it continues like this, I'm affraid as Rust will become more and more popular, we will get more and more inaccessible apps as a result, with excuses that noone will dig the code in developed state just to add accessibility.
It's somewhat ironic, on one side, I want Rust to grow, because I consider it a great language, but on the other side, we have this accessibility problem.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Is my point of view real, or am I just too pessimistic?
Best regards
Rastislav
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