I checked some examples in the playground and they seemed to be devoid of any kind of accessibility tags, and the generated HTML sources didn't look super friendly to screen readers.
A good UI library should definitely be accessible once it's in a mature release, but that's a fair bit of extra work to do up front when things are likely still in a state of flux; and since there's no guarantee there's even sufficient interest in Yet Another UI Library to get an upswing in usage, it's very possible no blind user will ever be exposed to a site powered by this in production at all, ever.
I'm not trying to say we should ignore blind people overall, but this comment is always in the top spot on every single new UI library and it's rather tiresome. How about some actually constructive criticism on the structure of how this library actually works?
I doubt that you can add a good accessibility layer after everything else is done and the absence of a plan is telling. Which is fine, if the author doesn't know or doesn't care, it's ok, it's his time and his project after all. But if you plan to build something with it you should question yourself: "is it accessible?".
In my opinion the parent question was perhaps a bit harsh but legit.
Well, accessibility is deeply about how it works, not so much something that can be tacked on afterwards.
Plus I think this is something constructive to consider.
"More than 3.4 million (3%) Americans aged 40 years and older are either legally blind (having visual acuity [VA] of 20/200 or worse or a visual field of less than 20 degrees) or are visually impaired (having VA of 20/40 or less) (Eye Diseases Prevalence Research Group, 2004)."
The percentage goes up sharply with age.
My daughter is a power user with a retinal disease. Being constantly marginalized as an unimportant case kinda sucks.
Again, me and you and everyone else definitely want production apps to be accessible! And yeah, it might rule out the selection of an immature library like this one for a larger scale project that has more concerns about missing out on the potential user base that have accessibility concerns. Fair enough.
It's like adding unit tests AFTER you've written everything. Just don't do it.
Funny you say this, because that's exactly what I do :)
I don't start unit tests on a new project/library until I flesh out most of the major components as I'm sure I'd be rewriting things multiple times as I'm iterating in the beginning. My guess is this method isn't uncommon....
That is: It's lower-level than something you would ask to support ARIA standards. It will support them if the markup you write for your Vugu components supports them. Vugu doesn't ship any built-in components or anything.