Jan Jaap de Groot

App Accessibility Engineer

Abra

Jan Jaap has been developing (accessible) apps for 10 years. Since 2018, Jan Jaap has specialized in making apps accessible by supporting accessibility features and assistive technologies. He leads the W3C Mobile Accessibility Task Force, is a chair of the Appt Foundation, and is co-founder of Abra; where he builds software to automatically detect accessibility issues in apps.

Semantics in, nothing out: Flutter's hidden accessibility regression

Lightning talk

Your Flutter semantics are correct. Your iOS app works. Your tests pass. Then TalkBack on Android says nothing. Same code. Different reality.

In November 2025, Flutter 3.38.0 broke the Android accessibility bridge. The bridge translating Flutter semantics into native Android accessibility changed its behavior. No errors. No warnings. Just broken accessibility.

This talk is for senior developers learning Flutter's accessibility internals:

1. How the accessibility bridge works between Flutter semantics and Android/iOS trees
2. Where it broke: The specific change that silently removed backward compatibility
3. Why you didn't catch it: Tests verified semantics while the platform layer ignored them
4. The invisibility trap: Platform parity hides obvious regressions
5. What you need to know: Your Flutter semantics might be broken

You'll understand more about cross-platform accessibility and why your test coverage may have a blind spot.

Based on a real production post-mortem.