Blind user here. I find Slack impossible to use. With more and more communities moving from IRC to Slack, I also feel the exclusion these days. Technologies/Companies like Slack make me wonder how long I will be able to usefully participate in the tech online. Watching how accessibility is systematically forgotten these days, I am not very hopeful.
I spend at least a few hours every week talking & gathering feedback from customers with disabilities. What I've learned, beyond the fact that our screen reader experience is not great (yet), is that we're not doing a good-enough job communicating the a11y improvements we've made. And because of this some users (particularly screen reader users) are sticking with the work-arounds from back in the day when our a11y support was indeed worse.
If you feel like it please write in to feedback@slack.com and we can set up a meet. I'd love to learn what we're doing wrong and potentially go through the support & improvements we've built.
This article should help as well. It's documenting not just the shortcuts but also how to perform different flows.
How accessible are open-source slack competitors like Mattermost?
I feel for you. I'm blind in one eye and am at a pretty high risk of going blind in the other because of it. I do my best to make sure the things I build are accessible; it's a real shame that accessibility is typically an afterthought.
We made a bot for slack which provides voice summary for web pages, it is invoked by @larynxBot [URL] to get the audio summary of web content right inside slack[1].
I didn't specifically target this as utility for visually impaired users(as we weren't able to test with such users), but was under opinion that it would help them if someone from the team shared links with our bot.
Reading your comment & that of others reg accessbility on slack makes me wonder if even when audio summary of URLs is received, whether someone with accessbility issues can click the player button.
Blind users already have their favourite screen readers. There is almost zero need for custom audio summary or alike features. Those are feature from sighted people for sighted people. But they have almost zero relevance to people relying on accessibility.
To answer that, I'd need to know what you actually mean by summary. Most screen readers present an overview of the number of HTML elements in a page when it just loaded. Something like "5 headings and 28 paragraphs".
Why would you want to provide audio summary of a page in the first place instead of providing a text summary? Reading text is about 2.5 times faster than listening to speech. And regardind accessibility, blind people can use their screenreader to get an audio version of the summary.
On the same topic: your landing page does a bad job of displaying what your app does and why it is useful for me as a user. I had to watch the "how to use" video to get an understanding.
larynxBot is part of the larynx platform, where one could share any content along with their own voice.
Users who received larynx content said they liked the voice summary of web content which their contacts sent to them & asked for a feature to summarise web content on-demand.
Hence, we released it as bots for Messenger, Telegram, Twitter & slack. I agree that the website portion of larynxBot can do a better job at explaining it.
Hi mlang23. The Slack screen reader experience isn't perfect but we've made significant improvements that it's usable, according to our testing & talking to screen reader users working for our customers. My colleague, and until recently our biggest critic, has documented our accessibility journey here (from a user's perspective, of course): https://marcozehe.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/status-of-the-acc...
