I used recently and it's impossible to use with keyboard only, you can try yourself.

During duty shifts I was helping our support. The incoming flow of requests had peaks of ~3-4 situations per minute, all as messages in Slack channel, needed to be responded in newly created thread each. I've come up with a flow, but I cannot avoid mouse at all.

Slack just does not have enough key bindings to be used without mouse! Slack was a bottleneck for me. If you are not willing to invest into UX that's fine to have gateways for people to use whatever client UI they need. But you just cannot wear to hats by both removing gateways and avoiding investing into your client UX. Result is plainly awful.

Nothing personal, I am actually hate using Slack, sad to say that. I will avoid using Slack in current state at all cost whenever I can.

Good luck to you! Hope you will make your product better!

(edit: formatting, newlines added)

SlackHQ, we are software developers, devops and QA engineers, data scientists and IT support specialists - we are your biggest user base! When we say it is not working, please, listen to us. Please, do try using your app without the mouse and maybe then you will see what we are talking about. It is not a baseless demand, our companies pay to use your service. If your codebase was open-sourced we would've fixed this issues ourselves. Please, don't make us hate you. When you just started you were awesome, but now you are slowly turning into Atlassian.

Could someone convince the higher-ups to add back some form of federated protocol to Slack, so third party clients can access the conversations?

I really miss being able to communicate via a light-weight, open-source, multi-protocol IM client.

Honestly, Matrix/Riot are becoming more appealing with each release, and support federated clients.

> open-source, multi-protocol IM client

If you're allowing your client to be multi-protocol then why is Slack's protocol unsuitable? You can use weechat with the Slack API right now and it works great.

The market for 3rd party applications using Slack is huge.

I haven't found a multi-protocol IM that supports Slack without loading the Slack app entirely. E.g. Rambox just renders the Slack app.

https://rambox.pro/#home

I used to use Pidgin to connect to several communication networks via a common UI, even with the promise of having a single contact list:

https://pidgin.im/

I just realized that Pidgin may have a community-maintained Slack plugin!

https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins

We need a federated communication protocol, similar to email, where we can have real-time communication with people and groups on various networks and using differing software.

You really should be building with a11y in mind from the get-go. It's 2019. The tooling is much, much better than it was in years past. It shouldn't be impossible for any enterprise to make a reasonably accessible application.

Nobody even expects 100% perfectly, semantically correct HTML documents. And it takes relatively little work to get reasonably good support. Like anything, the investment has diminishing returns but the 80/20 rule applies.

> More here: Posts link from January 2016

lol.

Try going a day without a mouse plugged in