AccessKit with Matt Campbell and Arnold Loubriat

May 29, 2025

Matt Campbell and Arnold Loubriat discuss their groundbreaking project, AccessKit, aimed at unifying accessibility protocols across platforms. Matt, a former Microsoft accessibility team member, shares insights into creating a Rust library that enhances GUI accessibility. They explore the innovative architecture of AccessKit, the significance of the accessibility tree, and the challenges faced in UI automation. The duo emphasizes community engagement and the importance of collaborative efforts in making technology inclusive for all.

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INSIGHT

AccessKit Unifies Accessibility APIs

AccessKit offers GUI toolkits a unified cross-platform abstraction over multiple platform accessibility APIs.
It uses a push model where the GUI toolkit sends a tree update to AccessKit, which is retained and queried by platform backends.

INSIGHT

The Accessibility Tree Explained

The accessibility tree is a hierarchy of nodes representing UI content and structure.
Each node has roles like button or label and properties such as the bounding rectangle and text value.

ANECDOTE

6000 Lines to Collaboration

Arnold contributed a massive 6000 lines of code to the WinAPI crate before joining AccessKit.
Their mutual work on Windows accessibility led to discovering each other's similar efforts and collaborating.

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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