Re: Win32 App Accessibility
Not much else that needs to be said. Anything using standard winforms or even the more modern WPF frameworks is very accessible, because it works well with the Windows accessibility API's like UIA that are used by screen readers to do their job.
What caused a decline in app accessibility in recent years, at least in my opinion is the prevalance of cross-platform GUI toolkits, which do a better or worse job of exposing accessibility related information to operating systems. WX is by far the best, because it usually just maps most controls to the native controls of a given operating system, so WX apps are really accessible (IE Audacity). However, QT gained even more traction, and while it has an accessibility API the support isn't anywhere nearly as good. For the longest time, the accessibility support wasn't even bundled with the toolkit so you had to ask developers to implement it or copy in DLL files and hope you get it to work. Now, the situation is decent enough on Windows, even better on Linux, but on the Mac side a lot of important QT widgets like trees, tables, lists and combo boxes still don't have any accessibility support so using many apps, like just about every multi-person voice chat solution is frustrating.
There's a few more toolkits out there, like GTK which is basically the native on Linux where accessibility is usually perfect, but nonexistant on other platforms, and juice which just straight up draws graphics to the screen so doesn't work well at all. And then there's Electron, which even though makes rather bloated applications can result in some really accessible experiences because they're just web pages, so following web accessibility guidelines results in very accessible, cross platform applications. At least on Windows and Mac because Chromium on Linux currently isn't accessible.
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