george_zamfir

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 [email protected] 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.

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...

Hi iLemming

My name is George Zamfir, I'm the Accessibility PM at Slack. I recorded a quick gif that shows how Slack works by keyboard, which covers the scenarios you mentioned as well.

And of course, it's all documented here: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/115003340723-Keyboa...

It's not perfect but it also doesn't seem impossible to me. Here's the gif: https://d1sz9tkli0lfjq.cloudfront.net/items/3y1j1Q1G1p033z06...

Here's a quick description of what's happening in the recording: The following is all you need to get around Slack by keyboard (and as an extension, with a screen reader): F6 to jump around the large UI sections, TAB for going through focusable elements, UP/DOWN for reading through messages in the message list / threads pane / Search / All Unreads / Threads, PGUP/PGDOWN/HOME/END to scroll through messages.

And lastly Search (`Cmd / Control + F`) now also allows jumping to users / channels / workspaces / etc. on top of regular search.