Understanding the Accessibility Tree and Its Components

With AccessKit, Matt Campbell and Arnold Loubriat took on the ambitious task of abstracting over the accessibility APIs of several target OS’ to offer toolkit providers one unified way to make their UIs accessible across platforms. This interview was recorded live at RustWeek 2025 with your host Luuk van der Duim.

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Timestamps & referenced resources

• [@1:11] - Introducing Matt and Arnold.
• [@1:45] - “What are you working on?”
• [@2:00] - “What does it offer?”
• [@2:28] - “Who would use AccessKit?”
• [@2:51] - AccessKit bindings in languages besides Rust.
• [@3:14] - Unifying accessibility protocols.
• [@4:47] - AccessKit’s API.
• [@6:58] - AccessKit tree concepts.
• [@8:47] - When Arnold got involved.
• [@9:08] - 6000 lines of code to find Matt.
• [@12:56] - Matt’s history with Windows and Microsoft.
• [@14:00] - How Quorum relates to AccessKit,
  • Quorum
• [@15:52] - Challenges Quorum UI development faced.
• [@18:12] - Arnold and Matt on the necessity for back-end testing, Android, iOS - Linux.
• [@21:45] - On Newton and its Chromium relation.
  • Newton
• [@27:55] - Newton on other compositers.
• [@29:20] - Wayland protocol purists versus Gnome D-Bus frictions.
  • “Next-generation accessibility architecture” document
• [@31:03] - Where can people find Arnold?
  • Arnold on GitHub as ‘DataTriny’
  • Arnold Loubriat on LinkedIn
  • DataTriny on Mastodon
• [@31:39] Where can people find Matt?
  • Matt Campbell on GitHub
  • AccessKit website.
• [@31:53] Your host can be found on GitHub.
  • Luuk van der Duim
  • Odilia screen reader
  • atspi crate

Credits

Intro Theme: Aerocity

Audio Editing: Luuk van der Duim

Samples used in interruption:

• “Vinyl - 45RPM - Start 2” by: day-garwood License: Attribution 3.0
• Record Scratch #3 by: musicvision31 License: Creative Commons 0

Hosting Infrastructure: Jon Gjengset

Show Notes: Luuk van der Duim

Hosts: Luuk van der Duim