Last week Slack announced that it would be rolling out a number of significant accessibility enhancements from 10 August.
See: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/slack-updates-accessible-equitable
It's been a few years since I last experimented with Slack, and at the time it wasn't a great experience with a screen reader.
The improvements mentioned in their post certainly appear to indicate that a lot of time and thought has been put in to the enhancements.
I was wondering if anybody has had an opportunity yet to test these latest improvements. And, if so, do they make it worth giving Slack another try?
Comments
Pleased to see some progress here, but...
Hey there,
First of all, I'd like to say it's great that Slack seems committed to improving the accessibility of their desktop app, I'm sure the changes mentioned in the blog post will be of some use to those Mac VO users needing to use it.
There is, however, one major pitfall to the Slack desktop app which results in the app being rather cumbersome to use with VO.
The app was built using the Electron framework, meaning that this is essentially a website with some extra features packaged up as an app bundle so that it can run natively on macOS, Windows and perhaps even Linux.
While this approach does make things a lot easier for Slack developers (they only have one unified codebase to work with across all operating systems, therefore reducing development cost), Electron, which in turn is based on Google's Chromium engine, only offers limited built-in accessibility support compared to native UI frameworks such as SwiftUI or AppKit.
I'm sure the developers of this framework are trying their best to improve things like native accessibility support and improved keyboard navigation, but when you have a framework which supports a variety of different operating systems which all come with their own design principles, limitations and different stages of Chromium support, what they have to do is shoot for the lowest common denominator to maintain platform cross compatibility.
This leaves it up to developers such as Slack to go in and spend lots of time and energy on making their Electron-based apps more accessible, however the end result is always going to fall short of what you could do with a native app.
As a simple example, the blog post mentions the introduction of a new shortcut, F6, which moves focus between the various sections of the app such as the list of channels and messages / threads.
While this probably works well, wouldn't it be great if all these areas were interactable containers that you could quickly navigate across using VO, interacting with them as needed? That would probably make experienced VO users feel right at home, alleviating the need of getting used to an app-specific navigation paradigm.
These differences do become clear very quickly once you take time to compare the Slack app on Mac vs iOS - the iOS app uses a native user interface, navigating with default VO gestures works as expected and is super painless, whereas the macOS variant can be a hassle to use especially in large workspaces with lots of active channels, threads, mentions and private messages.
If you're a 1Password for Mac user and have recently migrated from the native 1Password 7 to the Electron-based 1Password 8, you'll likely know exactly what I'm talking about - while both apps are fully usable with VO, doing things like jumping between your list of logins to a selected login's detail view were easily doable in version 7 by stopping to interact with one container, moving over to the next container and then interacting with it, in V8 it is now necessary to employ alternative techniques such as moving by heading as most of the hierarchy of that UI is now completely flat, at least as far as VO is concerned.
Personally speaking, I wish the team at Slack considered turning their excellent iOS app into a universal app by utilizing Catalyst, which would allow for that app to be used on macOS as well.
While Catalyst arguably also has bugs of its own, I'm sure this would still provide a much better experience, plus the community of Slackers who also happen to be using VO would probably be quick to report any critical bugs to Slack or Apple in the case of Catalyst bugs.
Let me just re-emphasize that this is just my personal opinion, I'm not trying to bash Slack, Electron or frankly anyone with what I said above.
I'm sure the folks working on Slack accessibility are doing their best to push whatever they have to the limit in order to provide the best possible accessibility experience, and that's something I applaud and deeply appreciate. However, sadly there's only so much you can do when building user interfaces with non-native tools and frameworks.
Robin
Just Registered on the Slack Website...
Hi. I realize it's now 2024 and more improvements have undoubtedly been implemented, but I just registered on their website this morning. Full disclosure: I'm one of the beta testers for Envision Assistant, and Slack is being used for discussions regarding the betas. I haven't used the Slack app--at least not yet--but their website seems pretty good in terms of VO performance on Mac OS. It's a bit confusing, but I came upon a user guide for navigating the platform with a screen reader. I bookmarked it. The only problem seems to be that the feedback form has a CAPTCHA checkbox which didn't work for me. I'm planning to go back to the guide though when I have more time.