IFTTT: automation & smart home

hello,the latest version of this app has no tabs aofg the bottom to managemy applets, just a lot of unlabelled buttons. why has this broken?

Will! I can‘t tell you why exactly they broke accessibility.
They just had the complete app redesigned, and my guess is that they simply didn’t care enough about accessibility. If they did, they would have ensured their product would meet minimal requirements before releasing it to the public.
However, the owner of the @Applevis twitter account had a brief exchange with the @IFTTT one a few days ago. And at least, IFTTT did provide this statement:
„Thanks for the feedback! We've got some more work to do on this and plan to improve accessibility significantly with upcoming updates.“
So yeah, they are obviously aware and working on it. But as they were very careful not to name any date for a fix, it might take a while...

Hey AppleVis community,

We know how important accessibility is when designing interfaces for everyone to use, and we also know we didn't do as good of a job on this as we could have. For that, we'd like to extend our apologies to those whose experiences using the app suffered as a result of some of these changes.

Now that the release is behind us, one of our top priorities is bringing accessibility back and better than ever with the new app. We'd like to hear from the community what's currently missing, and what other accessibility related improvements you'd like to see from IFTTT. We've been monitoring feedback pretty closely and your input is extremely valuable in bringing forth positive change for those that need accessibility from the apps they use.

Let us know what you think, and don't hold back. We can take it. :)

Dear Team at IFTTT,
Thank you for that message. I accept your apology. I however would like to stress that IFTTT for IOS has become completely unusable for the blind as of the 4.0 update. I would really, really appreciate a fast fix.
Currently, all the blind see is a long list of unlabeled buttons. The only exception to this is the „Search“ Edit Field.
Then after I‘ve searched for something, VoiceOver does announce two items named „Applets“ and „Services“, which I assume are used to select which of those should be displayed. But then, the results are once more a list of unlabeled buttons.
IFTTT used to be fully accessible once, so I guess you know how to fix hose.

Aside from fixing those issues now, do you think there‘s a possibility of adding at least some basic Accessibility Checking to your normal process of releasing upgrades?
Accessibility should be a priority always, not AFTER an app has launched. Even better: Do consider including accessibility to the process of actually designing an app. If accessibility is considered from the start, most issues can be dealt with a long time before they become problems.
Thanks for the work you put into this.
I use IFTTT a lot and I‘m glad to know it‘ll soon be accessible again.

The buttons are unlabeled. There is no way to change settings, add aplets, etc.

Even the IFTTT.com website is no longer accessible. I hope it will be fixed soon because I'm using a few applets to manage social media automation for my own project.

Hi
I very much appreciate that IFTTT engaged with the community on this too. Hopefully the app will be restored to it's previous state of accessibility, as it is not workable with VoiceOver in the present state.

Best
Malthe

Hey AppleVis community,

We wanted to give you a heads up that VoiceOver support will return to the vast majority of the app with the latest update that will be rolling out soon. There's still more work to be done, and we'd love your feedback here or by leaving a review in the App Store once you've gotten the new app on what else can be improved. We appreciate your patience as we worked to add VoiceOver to the new app and hope to bring more positive change for accessibility going forward.

Thanks for posting. I hope the accessibility at IFTTT extends across all of your platforms, including iOS, Android, and the web. It has been shaky at best over time, and I appreciate your commitment to universal access.

hi their, I love the update to the app, how ever when going to the skills we can't disable them, could you please fix this? when double tapping on the enable skill to disable it it just sits their and does not disable the skill.

Hello,
Thanks for making some progress towards accessibility. Please keep up the work.
Currently, when I open the app, it announces my applets like this: „Dropbox: works with facebook and soundcloud (Button“.
So, it does announce which services are involved. It does not, however, tell me what the applet is actually doing. I would guess that this info is visible, so I‘d appreciate VoiceOver announcing it.
I can of course double-tap the item and read its description on the „Details“ page, but I consider that a workaround. It also would be nice if the status of an applet, namely if it is activated or not, could be announced by VoiceOver. I have more than a dozen applets defined, but not all of them are actually active.

the website works!!!
I just tried to create a new applet and it worked perfectly on the website! Keep up the good work to increase accessibility! Thanks!

Hi,
Since the last update the app works well and is 90% accessible again from my experience. I can do most things I used to be able to do. You have to use the app in a slightly different way than before though which is what I think is confusing you René.
When you open the app the home screen shows all of your applets grouped by what services they connect to. For example the first item on my home screen says “Netatmo weather station, works with email notifications and Twitter.” If I tap on that I will see all the applets associated with those services that I have created or turned on grouped into one screen. From there if you press get more you can add other applets that use those services.
Voice-Over now reads out lots of information about each applet; its status, author and what services it works with.
Tapping on an applet will allow you to edit it and toggle it on or off as before.
To create your own applets, on the home screen tap get more, and then tap “make your own applets from scratch”. This is accessible again now. From the get more screen you can also search for other services and other users applets.
From the home screen if you tap profile image you can see your profile, account settings, activity and other options. You can also see all your connected services however this is not accessible at the moment as voice-over just reads unlabelled buttons.
To summarise, the app now groups all of your applets by the services they use on the home screen, so instead of seeing individual applets you will see Service groups. I personally like this new way but can see how it can take some getting used to.
Note: I can't yet see a way of searching through all of the applets in a service group so if you have lots of applets associated with one particular service like I do, it can take a while to find the one you're looking for.

Hello IFTTT development team,
I just installed IFTTT on my iPhone 6 and the App behaves very differently than what is described on the web.
First of all, creating a widget is not accessible from the main menu as described.
I was able to create a Button widget to send me an email and couldn't run it from the App.
I can't figure it out how to add an icon to run it , I could run it from the website only.
It would be useful to have some instructions for blind users.
Please let me know if you are still committed to support blind users.
Thanks,
John