fml

So should any of you think that the path to a good, accessible app that works everywhere, including on mobile is "Oh, I'll just build accessible HTML 5 and use a lot of ARIA, then use one of those frameworks that lets you do your UI in HTML and tack on a bunch of native code in the backend. My users will forgive the slight mismatch..." Oh I too was a summer child until 5 minutes ago. Let me save you the suffering. On Android at least, you will hit 2 barriers. One you might forgive. One you can't ignore.

The first is that Google's Android CLI, which is primarily designed for agents but is a perfect example of "we'll make things great for AI but not for actual disabled people," offers options to introspect your app's UI. Guess what those rely on? The plot twist is that browsers' web accessibility on Android don't pipe through its accessibility APIs. They're piped over IPC. This means the CLI hits the web boundary, finds null where it expects accessibility info, and nopes out. At that point, everything is screenshots and manual testing. You might decide "that's fine, we'll do it old-fashioned, I'll test and let the AI look at screenshots because I can't. Totally workable!" And then you'd be where I was, struggling along because you believed in HTML 5's virtue, such that it is.

The thing you can't ignore is that, because that accessibility is on the other side of an IPC barrier, it is subject to everything you'd expect an IPC barrier might be, including OOM. So you can write code that's perfectly compliant on every level, but it produces a DOM or accessibility tree update too large to serialize and pass across that boundary. Then your app OOMs because your table with 1800 cells is just too big for mobile but fine for desktop.

#FML So this suddenly needs a rewrite for native mobile. It's not super complex, and doesn't need extensive accessibility support, but needs a better accessibility story not pinned to an IPC boundary. I'd prefer Flutter only because I'm one guy who can't do all this alone, but what's the best native framework for accessibility? Guessing I'll have to hold my nose and go platform-specific, with Compose on Android and Swift or similar on iOS, but maybe there's a better option. Maybe, but likely not.