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Comment by ethin | Hacker News Reader

> This response doesn't make sense?

Apologies. I was noting that the lack of accessibility worried me (well, and weird accessibility breakage too).

You are dismissing again the answer you are getting. Why do you think it is lacking accessibility despite using a framework claiming " GPUI Kit ships 75+ documented components and primitives, WebAssembly support, AccessKit accessibility"

To be clear, GPUI Kit is not the same as GPUI. I am not sure if Discord is using GPUI Kit, but accessibility natively is possible with either.

It's reasonable to be concerned that Discord may not have focused on accessibility while rewriting.

It's less reasonable to be concerned that it may be impossible to write accessible apps using GPUI, as that is now possible (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/gpui/...) although this is a fairly recent addition.

It's also less reasonable to assume that an app made with GPUI Kit will automatically be accessible. You still need to put effort into it.

I don't know why people are ignoring the pink elephant here. For medium scale projects, like a Discord app is going to be, LLMs are now at a superhuman level of competence, including on higher level architectural/structural type decisions. I would be beyond surprised if the rewrite wasn't largely done by Claude (or similar). And in this context accessibility is also just a prompt away, if it wasn't included from the get-go, which it probably would have been.

Accessibility isn't just something you one-shot. It takes a lot of back-and-forth and testing with actual screen readers/accessibility scanning tools to be good.

I'm not dismissing it, just uncertain how good it is. Quality over quantity and all that. You can have 75 or 100 or 200 UI components and some can be perfectly accessible while others might not be even things accesskit supports right now. Or Accesskit may only partially support a widget. As I've said downthread, I'm hoping that Discord using a UI toolkit like this will cause upstream effects with respect to Accesskit coverage, so we'll have to see when they start migrating people over to it.

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