2021 Accessibility 2026: Widely adopted, one maintainer

AccessKit: one accessibility layer

Screen-reader support shouldn’t be rebuilt per framework.

Screen readers and other assistive tools need a description of your UI: what the buttons are, what they're labelled, which one has focus. For a toolkit that draws its own pixels, nothing provides that for free. AccessKit is a shared, toolkit-independent tree of nodes that a framework fills in, which platform adapters then expose to VoiceOver, Narrator, or AT-SPI on Linux.

accesskit-tree/src/bin/one.rs ✔ compiled · accesskit 0.25 · rustc 1.95.0

use accesskit::{Node, NodeId, Role, TreeInfo, TreeId, TreeUpdate};

const WINDOW: NodeId = NodeId(0);
const SAVE: NodeId = NodeId(1);

fn main() {
    let mut button = Node::new(Role::Button);
    button.set_label("Save");

    let mut window = Node::new(Role::Window);
    window.set_children(vec![SAVE]);

    // A description of the UI that a screen reader can walk, independent of
    // how (or whether) it is drawn.
    let update = TreeUpdate {
        nodes: vec![(WINDOW, window), (SAVE, button)],
        tree: Some(TreeInfo::new(WINDOW)),
        tree_id: TreeId::ROOT,
        focus: SAVE,
    };
    println!("{} nodes, focus on {:?}", update.nodes.len(), update.focus);
}

output

2 nodes, focus on #1

Nodes declare their role, label and state. Declaring supported actions is how a screen reader learns it may click or focus something on the user's behalf. A note from the compiler: in 0.25 the old Tree type has been deprecated in favour of TreeInfo, another reminder to pin versions.

accesskit-tree/src/bin/two.rs ✔ compiled · accesskit 0.25 · rustc 1.95.0

use accesskit::{Action, Node, NodeId, Role, Toggled};

fn main() {
    let mut checkbox = Node::new(Role::CheckBox);
    checkbox.set_label("Enable notifications");
    checkbox.set_toggled(Toggled::True);
    // Declaring supported actions is how a screen reader knows it may
    // "click" this widget on the user's behalf.
    checkbox.add_action(Action::Click);
    checkbox.add_action(Action::Focus);

    println!("{:?} toggled={:?}", checkbox.role(), checkbox.toggled());
    let _ = NodeId(2);
}

output

CheckBox toggled=Some(True)

Adoption is broad but uneven in versions. The lockfiles resolve AccessKit 0.24.1 for egui, Freya and Slint, 0.21.1 for Xilem and 0.17.1 for Dioxus Native, against 0.25.1 today. Iced, Floem and Makepad have no AccessKit in their lockfiles at all, and the published gpui 0.2.2 doesn't either; the July 2026 ecosystem report says gpui gained it in May 2026, the same month AccessKit's iOS support arrived. The same report notes AccessKit has had a single active maintainer since March 2026.