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Amusingly enough, I actually started thinking a bit about this just the other night after being told about a talk given at Dropbox about accessibility. To be up
by ibdknox 11y ago
Amusingly enough, I actually started thinking a bit about this just the other night after being told about a talk given at Dropbox about accessibility. To be up front, we know very little about it and the other night was the first time I'd ever tried to use a screen reader, so it's something we aren't likely to be good at right of the gate, but it is something we've been setting ourselves up for completely by accident.
Many of the previous versions of Eve would be pretty completely inaccessible, so your dismissal would definitely be warranted. The version we've decided to run with though basically has three parts: a document editor, embedded spreadsheet cells, and a fancy plain english search. All three of which have a history of accessible solutions, so that makes me much more optimistic that we can provide something nice here. Along the way, another thing we've been very cognizant about is making sure no matter what form of input you prefer, Eve should be efficient and useful to you whether you're using a keyboard, a mouse, or touch. Many of the interaction issues we'd need to solve to better work with screen readers popup when trying to support complete keyboardability, but I have no delusion that there will be plenty more to solve there. Another interesting aspect of this version of Eve is it's really easy to imagine a voice interface to since virtually everything is done using plain english queries - it'd be kind of like having Jarvis in your google docs.
Admittedly, we don't know what we're doing when it comes to accessibility, but it is something we've been thinking about indirectly and it's something I think we can at least do more naturally than the code editors of the world.
Thanks for raising the issue and it's something I'd like to have a more concrete answer for in the future.
- ndarilek 11y agoCool, glad to know this is on the radar! Out of curiosity, what are you using to render the current GUI? Toolkit/framework choice unfortunately has pretty significant a11y ramifications.
- ibdknox 11y agoIt's all HTML at the moment.
- ndarilek 11y agoHTML rendered via what? nw.js? Electron? I feel like the former is a bit more solid by virtue of having been around longer, but unfortunately both ecosystems are such a mess a11y-wise that I haven't really delved into them. In any case, it's probably a safer bet than something like GTK/QT which is either entirely or mostly inaccessible. But HTML rendered in a browser at least has the potential to be highly accessible, and one workaround for poor a11y implementation of nw.js/Electron would be exposing the HTML to another browser over a local port with functions callable via JS over the server port.
- joshuafcole 11y agoEve is served as remotely as a webapp, and it'll run in all modern browsers. Presently it's supporting Chrome first; but support for FF, IE Edge and others is on the map. Along the way, we're looking forward to gathering feedback on how we can improve user experience across the board, so please drop us a few issues on how we can make things better if you get the chance to try it out.