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Comment by Doohickey-d | Hacker News Reader

One nice thing about Électron is that it supports accessbility and non-english IMEs correctly, and thus all Electron apps have decent accessibility out of the box, comparable to web apps.

Most Rust GUI toolkits, at least in 2025, did not have that good accessibility or IME: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

Hopefully this has gotten better and the new discord client isn't worse in that regard.

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GPUI has a single-paragraph accessibility section in their guide that defers to AccessKit[1] for everything, and points to a raw RS file for more info.[2]

I haven’t tested it or written anything using GPUI, but I’d expect it to be considerably harder work, based on the maturity of the web stack in this area. My assumptions have definitely been proven wrong before though… Anyone from Discord working on accessibility want to chime in?

[1] https://accesskit.dev/

[2] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/gpui/...

oof. No proper support for IMEs is a huge non-starter for East Asia. Why don't they just use OS standard text renderers like everything before Rust?

Or is Discord planning to implement their own forks of existing IMEs into the app? Don't tell me they are going to just put in a tiny LLM and call it a day...

Windows IMEs used to emulate the style of edit control to display its candidate text, and the guess was frequently wrong. That's hardly a new problem for East Asian.

What worries me is that there's a general atmosphere that LLMs solved all NLP tasks, despite they don't do so well for kanji pronunciation <-> text mappings, likely for the lack of data - Japanese users especially don't post enough of organic data useful for that, apparently. Discord may be in a "good" spot to be able to (very invasively) collect that data by setting up a keylogger and comparing that to the final user-submitted text, but (aside from all the concerns) I'm not very hopeful about it.

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