Accessibility and the Dynamic Nature of Objective-C

Doug Russell, who used to work on accessibility at Apple, writes:

some of the code that powers accessibility on apple platforms is just disgusting to look at and to work on.

most of the code that makes apple software accessible lives in what’s called an accessibility bundle. without diving into the minutia of the thing, bundles are a way to load something akin to a plugin into a cocoa app at runtime if an assistive technology is activated. it involves manipulating the app or framework class hierarchy and using objective-c dynamism to read app state and build up a usable accessibility hierarchy. insert a super class here, read an instance variable there, swizzle in a method and store the state for it in associated objects.

In other words — Objective-C and its runtime play a big role in making Apple’s great accessibility possible.

What happens when that’s not really a thing anymore?