Matthias Clasen has published a short summary of the GTK hackfest held prior to FOSDEM 2026. Topics include
discussions on unstable APIs, a decision to bump the C runtime
requirement to C11 in the next development cycle, limiting changes in
GTK3 to crash and build fixes, as well as the state of
accessibility:
On the accessibility side, we are somewhat worried about the state
of AccessKit. The
code upstream is maintained, but we haven't seen movement in the GTK
implementation. We still default to the AT-SPI backend on Linux, but
AccessKit is used on Windows and macOS (and possibly Android in the
future); it would be nice to have consumers of the accessibility stack
looking at the code and issues.
On the AT-SPI side we are still missing proper feature negotiation
in the protocol; interfaces are now versioned on D-Bus, but there's no
mechanism to negotiate the supported set of roles or events between
toolkits, compositors, and assistive technologies, which makes running
newer applications on older OS versions harder.