Round 0 is the ladder's cheapest hard gate: for each candidate, a desk survey
and a demonstrated accessibility route -- a window exposing one node with a
role and a name, read back through the platform adapter. It is first precisely
so that a candidate with no accessibility story costs one round instead of
four.
C1 (egui/eframe 0.35.0) passes on a first-party route: egui-winit's accesskit
feature is literally dep:accesskit_winit, so the chain runs eframe ->
egui-winit -> accesskit_winit -> accesskit_unix and inherits that crate's
window-lifecycle handling. C2 (vello 0.9.0 + winit 0.30.13) passes on the
manual accesskit_winit route the contract names, wired into the same
ApplicationHandler that owns the vello renderer.
C3 (iced 0.14.0) FAILS, and the interesting part is that it first reported as
a pass. The probe registered a hand-built two-node tree through
accesskit_unix::Adapter, which takes no window handle at all -- only handlers
-- and registers with AT-SPI from process identity. It read back cleanly. It
also happened to label its button exactly as iced's own view() labelled a
button, so the transcript looked as though iced had produced it. Deleting iced
from that probe would produce the identical readback. Round 0 asks whether the
CANDIDATE exposes a route; a process-level side channel answers a different
question.
The verdict is recorded with dual attribution, because two distinct things
went wrong. The probe-design defect is the false positive above. The candidate
limitation -- which alone fails the round -- is that iced 0.14 ships no
accessibility integration anywhere (accesskit appears in no iced crate
manifest) and its stock runner hands application code neither the winit
ActiveEventLoop nor a pre-visibility Window, both of which every
accesskit_winit::Adapter constructor requires. That scoping matters and is
deliberate: iced_winit documents a conversion module for users implementing a
custom event loop, so a hand-built shell remains conceivable but unproven, and
would mean owning the shell. Upstream iced #552 is still open.
The evidence file keeps the verifier's factual READBACK: PASS beneath a
ROUND-0 RESULT: FAIL annotation rather than being rewritten. A corrected record
that erases the false positive teaches nobody why it was false.
Two findings carried forward. C1's frame node is unnamed -- its readback path
is application:'probe-egui' / frame:'' / button:'...' where C2 names its frame
-- which is non-disqualifying here but means a screen-reader user hears an
unnamed window, and round 3 must check it. And AT-SPI application registration
is gated behind two settings that are off by default; without both, probes
connect to the bus and enumerate zero applications, which would read as a
candidate failure rather than the environment absence it is.
The spike workspace lives outside the root workspace with its own lockfile;
the root gains one line, exclude = ["spikes"], and nothing else. Round 0's
probes depend on no epiphany crate, which is what makes this round independent
of the pinned source baseline the later rounds need.
Root gate unchanged: fmt clean, clippy -D warnings clean, 1371 tests passed 0
failed. Spike workspace gated separately: fmt clean, all probes build --locked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RSX4zSLgKvtiXaPjnMqLGz
Levi Neuwirth
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