Accesskit Alternatives

accesskit reviews and mentions

• Stability by Design
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 May 2025

  As a contributor to the Rust GUI ecosystem [1], I've been affected (somewhat) by that churn and have also contributed to it. The best defense I can give for doing what might be considered refuckering is that when my library eventually hits 1.0, I want to meet the same standard of stability as Rust itself, and when that point comes, as @munificent said [2], I want my library to represent my best understanding of how to design an API for what I'm doing, with no legacy baggage. Hopefully I don't piss off current users between now and 1.0.

  [1]: https://accesskit.dev/

  [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933068

• AgentKit: A Technical Vision for Building Universal AI Automation for Human-Computer Interaction Based on Rust
  2 projects | dev.to | 17 Apr 2025

  Just this Monday, I had come across Accesskit.dev, a cross-platform, cross-language Rust abstraction layer that encapsulates the native accessibility service APIs of different operating systems (like Windows, macOS, Linux/Unix, Android), such as UIA, NSAccessibility, AT-SPI, and the Android Accessibility Framework. At that time, I was thinking that if large language models were to act as humans, they would essentially be like people with disabilities (no derogatory meaning intended). This API set would be perfect for building AI Agents.

• File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern, robust interface
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2025

  Nice work. I noticed, though, that there's no accessibility for blind people or others who need assistive technology that uses the platform accessibility API. If you can accept a Rust dependency, here's my project for solving this problem: https://accesskit.dev/ We do provide pre-compiled static libraries of the C binding, so you don't need to directly introduce Rust into your build process. I specifically kept immediate-mode toolkits in mind when designing AccessKit. Or if you'd rather just look at our code and implement the accessibility APIs yourself, that's cool too.

• GUI Examples – Rye Language
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Sep 2024

  On that thread, I plugged my AccessKit project (https://accesskit.dev/). We have a C API now, and the project is much further along than when I commented on that old thread, so somebody could develop Go bindings now.

• Which open-source projects are widely used but maintained by just a few people?
  21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2024
• Clay (short for C Layout) is a high performance 2D UI layout library
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2024

  The accessibility is the hardest part. My custom library (in C# atop a weird rendering stack) has partial narration support and full touch/gamepad/mouse/keyboard navigation, but getting all the way to integrating with native screen readers is basically impossible at this point - from investigating it, it'd probably take me at least 3 months to get it working at all, and it wouldn't be portable.

  One thing you have to do for reasonable accessibility is maintain a retained model behind the scenes even if you have an immediate mode API, so that's what I did. The immediate mode API does a bunch of caching in order to construct an appropriate retained mode tree across frames, which makes it possible to cleanly handle things like focus, selection and narration for invisible controls, etc.

  I'm hoping eventually AccessKit (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit) will be mature enough to use though.

• Blitz: A lightweight, modular, extensible web renderer
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Aug 2024

  We have the basics (exposing an accessibility tree that is visible to screen readers, a keyboard controllable focus system). There's a lot more work to do be done to make it work well (but that's also true of Blitz in general).

  We're building upon https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit which provides a cross-platform abstraction over the OS accessibility APIs.

• Kivy – a cross platform Python UI framework
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2024
• Looking for this. html + css rendering through wgpu.
  14 projects | /r/rust | 3 Jul 2023

  If you were to implement this yourself, i'd look into either swash or cosmic-text for the text rendering stack (this is one of the things you really don't want to write from the ground up). For accessibility, AccessKit has quickly become the standard for communicating with crossplatform accessibility APIs in rust GUI. lightningcss (or its lower level counterpart cssparser) are both decent options for CSS parsing. Taffy handles some of what browsers offer for a layout engine, but is still being worked on.

• JetBrains Noria
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jun 2023

  > Fleet relies on the Java AWT/Swing framework to get a window from an operating system, but it doesn’t use the Java platform for managing its GUI components besides one JFrame and JPanel on top of it.

  This is a terrible decision that is going to bite them in the long run. Doing things this way makes it far, far more difficult to implement accessibility, and regulations on this are only going to get stricter.

  Implementing accessibility for a framework like that would involve three separate implementations for three separate platforms and the need to interface with D-Bus, COM and Objective C, from Java. I imagine that the latter two would be particularly difficult, considering how bad Java's FFI support is. It's not just calling methods either, you'd actually need to implement your own classes that conform to the relevant COM interfaces / Objective C protocols. There are libraries that can help with this[1], but I don't think they would work particularly well for something as complex as a code editor.

  [1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

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