Accessibility by default

[alice-i-cecile]

          These are fine for now, but needing to specify accessibility components manually kind of defeats the purpose of "accessibility by default", increases the burden on individual developers, and makes our UI examples more bloated / less approachable. I don't think its reasonable to expect your average game developer to remember to do this / do it correctly. Ideally our main "ui introduction example" has no explicit accessibility components.

Definitely cool with this as an initial step, but I think its very important to resolve this in the near future.

Originally posted by @cart in #6874 (comment)

[alice-i-cecile]

Agreed. I'd like to suggest that we adopt a subset of AccessKit's schema into Bevy's UI component structs, using it as the basis for our widget source of truth where possible. Essentially, the closer bevy_ui can come to creating NodeBuilders from its components, the fewer explicit accessibility examples we'll need, I feel like the accessibility schema covers much of what you'd need for a UI definition. At the very least, it'd be a solid start.

• @ndarilek, later in [Merged by Bors] - Integrate AccessKit #6874.

I agree with this assessment, this seems like a thoughtful API to build to, both for accessibility and in general.

[ndarilek]

If Bevy wants or needs an accessibility SME, I'm happy to step up. I think we may actually be the first general-purpose game engine integrating accessibility into its core (I.e. not a blind person-specific game engine, and not as a third-party plugin.)

[cart]

If Bevy wants or needs an accessibility SME, I'm happy to step up. I think we may actually be the first general-purpose game engine integrating accessibility into its core (I.e. not a blind person-specific game engine, and not as a third-party plugin.)

Brilliant. We will discuss this for the next round of SME appointments.

[Almost-Senseless-Coder]

Actually, the Quorum language (https://quorumlanguage.com/) has a (sorta...) general-purpose game engine built-in, and Andreas Stefik, the lead author/researcher, has published a BSD-licensed C++ library making communicating accessibility-relevant information from the game engine to the operating system easier.

That said, Quorum is built on top of Java. That alone can be a disadvantage in games development and the development process with quorum is relatively clunky - no automated recompilimg, for instance. The Quorum Studio IDE, in particular its accessible scene editor, is a boon to blind (or deafblind, like me) programmers, though.

I'll be watching this issue with interest.

[ndarilek]

Jeez, I'd totally forgotten about Quorum when I suggested that Bevy was the first general-purpose accessible game engine. Granted, it's pretty niche, but I wish it'd taken off more, and at least based on what I've read, it's a great example of making a 3-D game engine and editing environment both blind-accessible and visual. Might be worth us looking more closely into for inspiration of how to make visual editing more accessible in the upcoming editor.

Gotta admit, I'm occasionally tempted to abandon Bevy for Quorum even though it is a custom JVM language. It'd be nice for us to aspire to that level of accessibility both for developers and players. :)

I can submit a blog post update PR clarifying things a bit if there's interest. I think we should leave the existing claim in, but I'm comfortable giving Quorum the distinction of being the first general-purpose visual-first game engine that made the engine itself accessible. It just sounds like less of a big deal when spelled out like that. :)

Thanks for speaking out for Quorum.

[Almost-Senseless-Coder]

Giving people credit never hurts, especially fellow open-source projects. Besides, Stefik and his team will probably be happy to share experiences and expertise.

Still, Bevy's design system speaks to me more than that of the Quorum engine; I'm not talking about any disadvantages of the JVM and garbage collection yet, but the cleanliness of game code encouraged by Bevy's design decision is definitely an advantage.