I'm very disappointed to see that Slack has decided to go the way of every other messaging service and move away from decentralized and standardized protocols towards those that are walled and proprietary.
> We are focused on making Slack accessible to all people. Over the past year, we've made great progress in improving both the keyboard and screen reading experiences in Slack. We know many users have been relying on IRC and XMPP clients for a more accessible experience — but our goal is to build all of the accessibility features you need directly into Slack.
Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.
> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team.
Not just that, but it took them months to implement some (mind you, still not all) features that are useful for blind users that someone already did in a userscript in a few days. So yeah, I take this promise with some skepticism.
So either this is a lack of priority and disrespect to a part of their users or some level of incompetence.
I might sound harsh about this, but imagine being a blind software dev that's supposed to work with Slack to participate in teams. Every day you sign on to your team it's possible that the Slack devs break something and you can't function. And now they closed the escape hatch.
I hear you.
I worked with two blind systems people for close to 5 years - we were all working remote, so initially I had no idea they were blind - and subsequently learned from them about their struggles and frustrations dealing with shitty or nonexistent accessibility features.
And with assistive devices’ drivers that were broken, or not updated since Windows State of the Ark version, or not available on Linux or Mac, and so on.
These two people dramatically improved the accessibility features of the smartphone product that the company sells, by reporting the issues they found while dogfooding it. They raised the awareness of many people, including me, of the challenges of the blind, particularly in technology settings.
As a result, I learned ‘dot’ (graphviz) pretty well, and became much more text-centric in other ways (e.g. using markdown, avoiding images when possible, adding alt text).
Slack has done the community a disservice by dropping support for open protocols like IRC and XMPP, which support text-based interfaces that work well with screen readers.
So screen-reader usability is still a thing. The fact it's not using a proper standard open protocol is a problem.