Not to double post, but it looks like you can make custom widgets focusable via FocusNode.  You willing to do an experiment w.r.t. if we can use that to, e.g., focus text instructions?

That and support for live regions would be amazing.

this sort of relates to the entire thing. I opened up an issue about Linux accessibility. I don’t know if I explained everything very well because I am not that good of a writer but I hope it helps in someway.
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/95230

@Camlorn
that one was windows spicific. Nowhere was orca mentioned, it has a label saying "windows desktop” and that issue may close because of the work that was done to fix it, which, by the way, understandably, did not cover linux. That is why I made a new one for this purpose.

@camlorn
I probably do not understand you're issue correctly, But did you ever look into winit? It's a cross platform, Native rust windowing thingy
https://docs.rs/winit/latest/winit/

@34, I've found that many electron apps that I use today don't require any flags at all -- they just work out of the box. Perhaps its time to contribute to electron to force accessibility to be enabled on all platforms as well as  carrot browsing... There's no reason it should ever be disabled IMO. The problem is then actually getting companies to use that updated version of electron...

@36
The reason that Flutter doesn't enable accessibility by default is because it slows down the loading of the widget tree. IIRC, it's not a permanent thing, but only while they improve the speed of loading semantics.

@27
Of course I will mate. Anything I can do to help. I'm working on an app right now that has some place holder texts. I can try and make one of those focusable.

@camlorn
I think BGTLover is working on something like that. That is at least what I have heard from him. There is also a guide to atspi on his screen reader project's site. Don't know how up to date that information actually is.
I want to help, but I am not that good of a programmer yet, so improving accessibility of flutter is out of the question. Is there really anything I am able to contribute here besides the issues I make in order to at least try to help?
And I wouldn't say I am crying about accessibility, If someone tells me that they need docs for something, I will either hunt down some docs or I could get in contact with someone that knows about it and ask them if they would throw something together as a kind of temporary documentation, And if there is no documentation able to be created or if they just simply can’t work on it, I won’t press the issue unless I have a justifiable reason to.

@38
There is a "Enable Accessibility" button, so it's pretty clear how you can proceed. 3 lines of code and you can get rid of that though, so it's fine.

Also, there are already live regions via the Semantics class.

@42
Wow, awesome.  Once I settle on a design I will totally try this out. You'd think that I'd be able to throw together robust keyboard handling/ui architecture for a networked game in my sleep but this is sadly not the case, kind of punting it down the road a little bit since everything I'm writing has unit tests and stuff and in theory just needs wiring at the end.  Hopefully we'll have a soundmud-quality prototype sometime "soon" though.

Fwiw live regions may or may not work on desktop.  They used to not work on iOS I believe, though when I was looking into this I didn't check on the timelines.  They also don't offer assertive ones which is kind of meh so probably we end up using tolk or whatever, but that's fine.  Still an improvement over reinventing the UI wheel.

Yeah.  Tbh I'm glad they don't offer assertive live regions, because generally people use them wrong in the rare cases where they do get used.  It's inconvenient for my case, but it's one of the things you can use so badly that the page is literally unusable because you can't get the damned thing to shut up and it keeps interrupting the speech that you need to hear to do anything.  I have encountered sites that for some reason think that (1) timers need live regions around them and (2) this live region should interrupt the screen reader every second.  If you asked me to rate "bugs where people really drop the ball and it's unusable without opening the web debugger and live-tweaking the html", this one is number 2 on my list behind misuse/forgetting to toggle aria-hidden.

But it would be nice to not have to juggle packaging a bunch of dlls.  Alas.

because of a frustrating odilia bug that had me scrapping an entire branch pending redue from scratch tomorrow, I decided to do something not in rust at all, then I remembered the flutter accessibility things on windows since linux is not usable enough yet, so I decided to try it.
I see focus is working, even if I apply it to a label or some other controll like that, so that's not a problem.
however, can someone verify that live regions actually don't work on desktop, at least not with nvda?
if it's of some help, here's a fragment from the build method of the code I tryed it with, kinda the starter application, just a bit modified to illustrate my point.
if the code seemns too nested and weird, it's either because I just wanted to see if it'd work and I did no refactoring before posting, or because vscode is scruing itself and decides the norm today is two spaces in stead of four per indentation level, or actually both. Either way, here goes

return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text(widget.title),
      ),
      body: Center(
        child: Row(
          mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
          children: <Widget>[
            Semantics(
              child: Focus(
                child: Text(
                  'You have pushed the button $_counter times',
                  style: Theme.of(context).textTheme.headline4,
                ),
              ),
              liveRegion: true,
            ),
          ],
        ),
      ),
      floatingActionButton: FloatingActionButton(
          onPressed: _incrementCounter,
          tooltip: 'Increment',
          child: const Icon(Icons.add),
          style: ButtonStyle(
              shape: MaterialStateProperty.all<RoundedRectangleBorder>(
                  RoundedRectangleBorder(
                      borderRadius: BorderRadius.circular(18.0),
                      side: BorderSide(
                          color: Colors
                              .black))))), // This trailing comma makes auto-formatting nicer for build methods.
    );

So, focus works, however live regions don't work on windows at all. I mean, one could do so that the function that updates the live region would also speak it with tts, but anyway, am I doing something wrong here, or it is just how it is for now? if it's not normal, I'm ready to open an issue and we'll see what comes of it. Anyone has any insight? how is the live region stuff usually handled in the desktop realm?

@47: That kind of threw out my chances of trying dart... Oh dear, 5 closing parenthesies on one line?