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I don't post often on HN, but today couldn't resist. Just tested Utox on Windows as well as Toxy, also on Windows. Both programs are totally inaccessible for pe

by bramd 12y ago

I don't post often on HN, but today couldn't resist. Just tested Utox on Windows as well as Toxy, also on Windows. Both programs are totally inaccessible for people using a screenreader and I'm quite sure as well for people using things like speech recognition. Utox seems to be C++ and a GUI framework I didn't look into. Toxy is .NET+WPF... two different stacks, but two inaccessible programs. I'm quite sure the developers didn't write inaccessible software deliberately, but this makes me wonder if we need either: 1. Inform developers better about accessibility 2. Fix tooling: warn/error if you don't label your elements etc 3. All of the above... To give this post some more context, earlier this week I looked at Stellar... their web client is inaccessible. Earlier this week Wunderlist released a version 3... iOS app is nearly inaccessible. Earlier this week I finally wanted to give Foursquare's new Swarm app a shot... inaccessible. Do you see the pattern? I'm sorry for ranting about this, but imagine some random app update did stop the app from working and only displayed a black screen, you would be annoyed at least.

biomechanica 12y ago
As far as I can tell, uTox is written in C and uses XLib (on GNU/Linux, at least).
kohanz 12y ago
Seems like these would be useful suggestions to add to the respective github pages of those projects. Also, they are open-source, so there's an opportunity there if you have expertise in making UI's accessible.
mahkoh 12y ago
>Utox seems to be C++ and a GUI framework I didn't look into. utox is written in C and uses its own toolkit so that it looks the same everywhere. For that reason it will probably never give you the level of accessibility provided by more mature toolkits.
mind-blight 12y ago
The software is in alpha, so I imagine screen reader accessibility is lower on their priority list. Once it becomes late stage beta, then accessibility complaints are more reasonable. Until then, core features should take precedence.
zz1 12y ago
We need 1.
dm2 12y ago
Are there any good tools/guides for evaluating a websites / apps accessibility? I'm a developer but do not ever focus on accessibility because nobody has brought it to my attention, not a single bug report or conversation from management.

by bramd 12y ago

biomechanica 12y ago

As far as I can tell, uTox is written in C and uses XLib (on GNU/Linux, at least).

kohanz 12y ago

Seems like these would be useful suggestions to add to the respective github pages of those projects. Also, they are open-source, so there's an opportunity there if you have expertise in making UI's accessible.

mahkoh 12y ago

>Utox seems to be C++ and a GUI framework I didn't look into. utox is written in C and uses its own toolkit so that it looks the same everywhere. For that reason it will probably never give you the level of accessibility provided by more mature toolkits.

mind-blight 12y ago

The software is in alpha, so I imagine screen reader accessibility is lower on their priority list. Once it becomes late stage beta, then accessibility complaints are more reasonable. Until then, core features should take precedence.

zz1 12y ago

We need 1.

dm2 12y ago

Are there any good tools/guides for evaluating a websites / apps accessibility? I'm a developer but do not ever focus on accessibility because nobody has brought it to my attention, not a single bug report or conversation from management.