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Accessibility in both Notion and Confluence is absolutely abysmal. Any chance you have thought about this while working on Docmost so far? This is a pretty impo

Accessibility in both Notion and Confluence is absolutely abysmal. Any chance you have thought about this while working on Docmost so far? This is a pretty important thing for companies to adopt this, with ADA in the US and the upcoming EAA within the EU. Also it'd be nice to have a product that actually did their homework where this is concerned for once :) Let me know if you want me to give it a once-over. DIsclaimer: native screen reader user, blind person, developer, accessibility auditor and all that jazz.

replwoacause 2y ago
How important could this be to companies really, if they are using Confluence and Notion, which are already doing this poorly.
- jasonjayr 2y ago
  I understand that in the US, the ADA can make for a nasty sting which can make them care in a hurry.
- hnthrowaway121 2y ago
  Depends on the company. In many areas companies are required to not discriminate against disabled employees. Just like your physical space must be accessible, your digital tools must be too. Otherwise you would might, say, pass on a more experienced and knowledgeable blind candidate in favor of a less qualified sighted person, because your internal tools can’t be used independently by a blind person. Lots of companies are technically exposed to the risks related to this kind of thing, could be legitimately sued. But they don’t always recognize this aspect of their exposure. It seems natural to me that this sort of thing will become more important over time. More interesting to me though is what prompted your question. Parent requested making things accessible because that’s something as individual they need and benefit from. It wasn’t about how important it might be to “companies”. Individual people need accessibility.
elliotec 2y ago
Also auth. I would rather just lose all my shit than try to go through the login rigamarole on either of these sites again.
- j33zusjuice 2y ago
  Are we talking about Confluence from Atlassian’s login? What’s so bad about it? It’s usually tied to your SSO provider, so you just have to sign in to your work account. In the server days, it was connected to your AD/LDAP password. I don’t like Atlassian products very much for a lot of reasons (each iteration of the UI gets worse), but the login process has never been an issue for me, so I’m surprised to see your comment.
  - alufers 2y ago
    Not OP, but have to use the cloud version of Jira and Confluence. My biggest complaint is that they put the "Yes! Send me news and offers from Atlassian about products, events, and more." checkbox in the place where I would expect the "Remember me" checkbox. Absolutely psychopatic behaviour.
    - iamacyborg 2y ago
      I can’t explain how frustrating it is on Amazon where that checkbox instead reveals your password in plain text. Super easy way to dox yourself.
kazinator 2y ago
> Accessibility in both Notion and Confluence is absolutely abysmal. And that's just for people with typical hands and eyes. Imagine of what it's like for people with disabilities.
- samspot 2y ago
  I think you are talking about Usability here. Usability: This button is hard to understand and/or confusing to operate. Accessibility: I cannot operate the button AT ALL, cannot perceive it, or can only do so using advanced assistive technology tricks.
- input_sh 2y ago
  Piggybacking to ask: I'd love to pay like a $100 to a person with disabilities to use my website for a couple of hours and shit on the experience. Has anyone ever done this? Is there a service you've used and have been happy with? My exerience with automated tools has been less than stellar. Oh, an image has an alt tag? Congrats, it's accessible, even if that alt tag literally just says "alt tag". I also don't think "simply turn on accessibility features yourself" is a proper solution. It feels like there's a massive difference between me using such tools for the the purpose of testing one website and someone actually relying on such tools.
  - ylk 2y ago
    Let me preface with: I’m neither a web dev nor experienced with accessibility. Which tools did you use? I’d argue a human probably also won’t review all your alt tags manually or you could just do it yourself, too. If you have lots of them it might make sense to extract them automatically and pipe them to some language model to generate a score for each of them. Then you can review the ones with the worst scores. It seems to me that https://wave.webaim.org/ https://wave.webaim.org/ does a good job with ensuring contrast is good, etc., as once I followed all the recommendations things are also readable when using Dev Tools to simulate various vision deficiencies.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
jack_riminton 2y ago
Whilst important, it certainly wouldn't be the top of my list of things to tackle when getting a project off the ground
- riedel 2y ago
  I think it makes sense to learn about it early and do a11y as much by design as possible. I think a universal design approach will help anyone. Many power users will appreciate good keyboard only navigation as a side effect. With a bit of a11y knowledge you might be able to catch a lot of low hanging fruits. Wouldn't do it with public procurement and overdone rigout in mind. Just spinning up a screen reader on an app can actually be a fun experience.
- talkin 2y ago
  That’s the most common approach, but a cynical rewording of that statement is: I’m not making it accessible by default.
- zersiax 2y ago
  And while that is a perfectly valid stance to have on this, you'll more than likely shoot yourself in the foot if you don't. - Wayland didn't think it was important to immediately include this, and now we have the majority of linux distributions having serious issues with screenreaders and other assistive tech. Fedora's shipped with this broken for almsot a decade. Calamares didn't think it'd be important to fix and has been broken for about as long. - Particularly now, with devs grabbing a component library on top of React with a generous helping of CSS frameworks and third-party NPM-based extra bits that are all tangled together, and what have you, if you don't vet this stuff beforehand you'll have to retrofit half your UI to fix things after the fact. That, right there, is why accessibility seems so hard to implement. Fixing a native HTML select for accessibility is easy; it already is. Fixing some componentized overengineered monstrosity that figured they'd get to it later and as a result doesn't speak with screen readers, doesn't work on phones, doesn't work when zoomed in, doesn't respond to speech recognition software, goes absolutely nuts when the user scrolls, and doesn't let you use it properly with a keyboard... yeah that is harder :)
Pi9h 2y ago
I thought about it. For example, the sidebar page tree supports keyboard navigation. The UI library I am using, Mantine, follows accessibility best practices and has full keyboard support. There is still a lot to do in this regard. As the project progresses, more support will come. In the past, I built a Twitter bot (@threadvoice) to help people listen to Twitter threads in audio format ( https://twitter.com/Philipofficial9/status/1189971185800486914 https://twitter.com/Philipofficial9/status/11899711858004869... ). I had accessibility as one of my motivations while building it.

replwoacause 2y ago

How important could this be to companies really, if they are using Confluence and Notion, which are already doing this poorly.

jasonjayr 2y ago
I understand that in the US, the ADA can make for a nasty sting which can make them care in a hurry.
hnthrowaway121 2y ago
Depends on the company. In many areas companies are required to not discriminate against disabled employees. Just like your physical space must be accessible, your digital tools must be too. Otherwise you would might, say, pass on a more experienced and knowledgeable blind candidate in favor of a less qualified sighted person, because your internal tools can’t be used independently by a blind person. Lots of companies are technically exposed to the risks related to this kind of thing, could be legitimately sued. But they don’t always recognize this aspect of their exposure. It seems natural to me that this sort of thing will become more important over time. More interesting to me though is what prompted your question. Parent requested making things accessible because that’s something as individual they need and benefit from. It wasn’t about how important it might be to “companies”. Individual people need accessibility.

elliotec 2y ago

Also auth. I would rather just lose all my shit than try to go through the login rigamarole on either of these sites again.

j33zusjuice 2y ago
Are we talking about Confluence from Atlassian’s login? What’s so bad about it? It’s usually tied to your SSO provider, so you just have to sign in to your work account. In the server days, it was connected to your AD/LDAP password. I don’t like Atlassian products very much for a lot of reasons (each iteration of the UI gets worse), but the login process has never been an issue for me, so I’m surprised to see your comment.
- alufers 2y ago
  Not OP, but have to use the cloud version of Jira and Confluence. My biggest complaint is that they put the "Yes! Send me news and offers from Atlassian about products, events, and more." checkbox in the place where I would expect the "Remember me" checkbox. Absolutely psychopatic behaviour.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    I can’t explain how frustrating it is on Amazon where that checkbox instead reveals your password in plain text. Super easy way to dox yourself.

kazinator 2y ago

> Accessibility in both Notion and Confluence is absolutely abysmal. And that's just for people with typical hands and eyes. Imagine of what it's like for people with disabilities.

samspot 2y ago
I think you are talking about Usability here. Usability: This button is hard to understand and/or confusing to operate. Accessibility: I cannot operate the button AT ALL, cannot perceive it, or can only do so using advanced assistive technology tricks.
input_sh 2y ago
Piggybacking to ask: I'd love to pay like a $100 to a person with disabilities to use my website for a couple of hours and shit on the experience. Has anyone ever done this? Is there a service you've used and have been happy with? My exerience with automated tools has been less than stellar. Oh, an image has an alt tag? Congrats, it's accessible, even if that alt tag literally just says "alt tag". I also don't think "simply turn on accessibility features yourself" is a proper solution. It feels like there's a massive difference between me using such tools for the the purpose of testing one website and someone actually relying on such tools.
- ylk 2y ago
  Let me preface with: I’m neither a web dev nor experienced with accessibility. Which tools did you use? I’d argue a human probably also won’t review all your alt tags manually or you could just do it yourself, too. If you have lots of them it might make sense to extract them automatically and pipe them to some language model to generate a score for each of them. Then you can review the ones with the worst scores. It seems to me that https://wave.webaim.org/ https://wave.webaim.org/ does a good job with ensuring contrast is good, etc., as once I followed all the recommendations things are also readable when using Dev Tools to simulate various vision deficiencies.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

jack_riminton 2y ago

Whilst important, it certainly wouldn't be the top of my list of things to tackle when getting a project off the ground

riedel 2y ago
I think it makes sense to learn about it early and do a11y as much by design as possible. I think a universal design approach will help anyone. Many power users will appreciate good keyboard only navigation as a side effect. With a bit of a11y knowledge you might be able to catch a lot of low hanging fruits. Wouldn't do it with public procurement and overdone rigout in mind. Just spinning up a screen reader on an app can actually be a fun experience.
talkin 2y ago
That’s the most common approach, but a cynical rewording of that statement is: I’m not making it accessible by default.
zersiax 2y ago
And while that is a perfectly valid stance to have on this, you'll more than likely shoot yourself in the foot if you don't. - Wayland didn't think it was important to immediately include this, and now we have the majority of linux distributions having serious issues with screenreaders and other assistive tech. Fedora's shipped with this broken for almsot a decade. Calamares didn't think it'd be important to fix and has been broken for about as long. - Particularly now, with devs grabbing a component library on top of React with a generous helping of CSS frameworks and third-party NPM-based extra bits that are all tangled together, and what have you, if you don't vet this stuff beforehand you'll have to retrofit half your UI to fix things after the fact. That, right there, is why accessibility seems so hard to implement. Fixing a native HTML select for accessibility is easy; it already is. Fixing some componentized overengineered monstrosity that figured they'd get to it later and as a result doesn't speak with screen readers, doesn't work on phones, doesn't work when zoomed in, doesn't respond to speech recognition software, goes absolutely nuts when the user scrolls, and doesn't let you use it properly with a keyboard... yeah that is harder :)

Pi9h 2y ago

I thought about it. For example, the sidebar page tree supports keyboard navigation. The UI library I am using, Mantine, follows accessibility best practices and has full keyboard support. There is still a lot to do in this regard. As the project progresses, more support will come. In the past, I built a Twitter bot (@threadvoice) to help people listen to Twitter threads in audio format ( https://twitter.com/Philipofficial9/status/1189971185800486914 https://twitter.com/Philipofficial9/status/11899711858004869... ). I had accessibility as one of my motivations while building it.