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Slack dev here. We've actually fixed quite a few accessibility issues over the last year or so. There's still a ton to do, but if you haven't used Slack with a

by throwaway190619 7y ago

Slack dev here. We've actually fixed quite a few accessibility issues over the last year or so. There's still a ton to do, but if you haven't used Slack with a keyboard recently, give it a whirl. More here: https://marcozehe.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/status-of-the-accessibility-of-slack/ https://marcozehe.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/status-of-the-acc...

tanzann 7y ago
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)
- iLemming 7y ago
  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.
tomglynch 7y ago
> More here: Posts link from January 2016 lol.
brylie 7y ago
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.
- Spivak 7y ago
  > 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.
  - brylie 7y ago
    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 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/ https://pidgin.im/ I just realized that Pidgin may have a community-maintained Slack plugin! https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins 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.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
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.
jperry 7y ago
Try going a day without a mouse plugged in

tanzann 7y ago

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)

iLemming 7y ago
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.

tomglynch 7y ago

> More here: Posts link from January 2016 lol.

brylie 7y ago

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.

Spivak 7y ago
> 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.
- brylie 7y ago
  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 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/ https://pidgin.im/ I just realized that Pidgin may have a community-maintained Slack plugin! https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins 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.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

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.

jperry 7y ago

Try going a day without a mouse plugged in