Accessibility Semantics: The UI Tree You Cannot See

Accessibility has become personal for me. I am getting older, and large type is no longer an abstract preference somebody else needs. It is how I read a phone comfortably. What is Codename One? Codename One is an open-source framework for building native iOS, Android, desktop, and web apps from a single Java or Kotlin codebase. Learn more at codenameone.com . I worked with accessibility experts at Sun Microsystems and learned how deep the problem goes. A label is the easy part. Real accessibility needs roles, values, ranges, actions, traversal order, live announcements, collections, focus, platform conventions, and a way to test all of it. That complexity is why full Codename One accessibility support sat dormant for a decade. We eventually added setAccessibilityText() . It was useful, but it was the poor man's version. PR #5363 replaces that single-label model with a portable semantics tree we can be proud of. Lightweight UI needs a second tree Codename One paints lightweight components into its own native surface. VoiceOver cannot inspect a Button as a UIKit button because there is no UIKit button there. TalkBack cannot walk an Android View hierarchy because most of the painted controls are not Android views. The new accessibility manager builds an immutable virtual tree beside the visual component tree. Standard controls infer their semantics. Custom controls can replace or extend them. Each port exposes that virtual tree through the platform accessibility API. The visual and semantic hierarchies can differ. A card made from five labels might need to read as one item. A chart may paint 200 points from one component, but expose each meaningful point as a virtual child. A renderer-backed list can expose stable rows even though those rows are not component instances. Standard components work without annotations Buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, sliders, text fields, lists, tables, tabs, labels, dialogs, and containers infer their normal roles, values, states, and