OK, time for a confession: I tried to use Visual Studio @Code as my primary editor on MacOS and Windows, heck I even contributed several pieces of accessibility advice to the project over the past few months. But I keep flipping back to truly platform-native apps.

These are NotePad++ on Windows, and TextMate on the Mac. The reasons are mainly faster execution, faster to get things done, even when keystrokes are similar and well-memorized.
Another reason is less screen reader quirkiness when interacting with controls.

There are just so many little reminders here, there and everywhere that one is dealing with a UI framework whose roots are inherently document-based. Every Electron app is a HTML document at its core, and HTML was never designed from the ground up as a UI framework.

And like HTML itself, the screen reader interaction with it was designed with a document-first paradigm, especially on Windows. There are things such as banner, main, complementary landmarks or labeled regions, which you’d never encounter in an UIA, MSAA or AppKit-based App.

The same is true for mobile. There, it is even worse because there are no compound elements for tweets, posts or inbox entries, and there are no custom actions. They scream WebView through the screen reader with every interaction.

So even after almost 15 years of working on this stuff, API mappings and all, we, the A11Y community working on rendering engines and AT, have not managed to tweak, twist and bend the document nature of HTML far enough to fully fake a native experience.

And yes, these quirks exist in every screen reader and rendering engine combination. But for this example most importantly, every Electron app screams “I’m an HTML document running inside a headless web browser engine.” through the screen reader.