What are the performance implications of always running in screen reader mode?

[nikitavoloboev]

I am wondering this as it seems like this would cause a lot of CPU time to process everything in screen reader mode. Maybe I am wrong?

Is the effect negligible?

[dexterleng]

I assume this is a prompt you received with an Electron/Chromium app like Discord.

Webapps, unlike native mac apps, do not report UI element information (e.g. button location) to the Accessibility API until you specify you are a screen reader to them.

I've yet to do profiling, but yeah, there should be a performance impact:

electron/electron#7206 (comment)

[dexterleng]

I will look into disabling the screen reader mode when it is not used.

One solution I've tried is to enable the AXManualAccessibility attribute right before Hint/Scroll mode, but there is some race condition preventing it from working.

The AXManualAccessibility attribute could also be set to false when the electron app is no longer front-most so it doesn't suck up battery while in the background.