a11y requires a large range of features, because of wayland most OSKs are now platform specific, we can’t have overlays (we might be able to when the layers protocol lands, but thats a privleged protocol which is kind of up in the air how it’s handled) etc. a11y requires an entire ecosystem, you cant just lay it on the tool kits, compositors handle a lot too.

Ah, that makes sense. Tbf I'm not too familiar with it and mainly thought about screen readers and such, where only the toolkit knows what text is displayed since everything afterwards just gets a frame buffer. It would be great to get a portable way to do overlays and feedback like "user has focused a text input control", yeah. How does this work on X11?

I have absolutely no idea why people keep saying this. weston doesn’t support some xdg protocols, and gnome some ext protocols, so why the does this matter? clearly neither xdg nor ext protocols are mandatory, so it has nothing to do with compositors not wanting to implement it.

As far as I know xdg protocols are supposed to be mandatory, ext ones aren't. Weston devs just don't care I suppose. (Though I can't actually verify this so correct me if I'm wrong. I just know that getting a protocol included into xdg is a lot harder.)