Help Dropbox improve their accessibility

By CMaury, 7 January, 2013

Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Hi everyone, I'm going to be helping Dropbox improve the accessibility of their products (iOS app, web app, OSX app). It would be great to get your feedback, complaints, and suggestions. This is a good opportunity to get your voice heard while they are dedicating resources to improving the site. We will be working on this all week so please let us know! Chris Ps. I don't work for Dropbox, they just invited me in to help out.

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Comments

By KE7ZUM on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 01:24

Fix the share options. I would expect them to open in a new page but they seem to have adopted this thing where you have to scroll around to kick someone out of a folder. Also the mac client has issues. The selective synch thing will not read in the prefs and it makes it hard to know what and what not to synch. I can't think of anything else at the moment.

OK this isn't accessibility related, but if this feature could be added or be considered for adding I would appreciate it, I suggested it already to them but don't think they were really interested, or maybe the person who replied to me wasn't really in a position to do anything. I would really like an option to sync a hole folder with my phone that is already on dropbox. At the moment it is only possible to sync individual files on the phone. And yet, the pc client can sync a hole folder with no problem. Lets imagine I have a folder with a few hundred files in, its just impractical to select them individually for syncing. Yes, OK I suppose I could zip the folder up and put it on dropbox, but that's a hole extra unneeded step just because I am working with dropbox on my phone, as I have to download the zip file, uncompress it etc all of which takes time and space on your phone. Is having the same features on the IOS client as the pc client really two much to ask? at the moment the lack of hole folder syncing means that I have to think will I need this folder on my phone and if so make a special point of uploading a zip file just to work with it. Also, there are plugins available for android that allow for the downloading of hole folders from dropbox, so I just want the same on ios as pc and android users have.

It seams that the web interface to share a dropbox folder isn't as accessible as it could be. When I enter an e-mail address and hit the button to move on, it tells me to, "please enter a valid name or e-mail address". Maybe adding this feature to the iOS app as well could help us out. thanks much for your time in getting these thoughts to the Dropbox dev team.

By 1SilkyGirl (not verified) on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 01:24

It would be nice if a work-around could be made so fewer system resources could be used, at least where Windows is concerned.

By Elena Brescacin on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 01:24

Hello, I am available to give feedbacks for dropbox First of all, dropbox website is full of non-standard controls both using Windows screen readers and mac/iOS native voiceover system, the main controls -upload, new folder, show deleted files, restore...-, are shown as graphics. Labelled, but graphics. There is no way to use the tab key to go through controls, and when you click on them with mouse emulator commands, the submenus wich appears are out from screenreader's view so you have to go around the page till you find something regarding the button you have clicked. iPhone app is more immediate, but, it has not the ability to share an entire folder, for example the invitation acceptance is not immediate when you click on the "john doe invites you to share a folder" e-mail, with related "view folder" link, acceptance should be immediate that is, you click the "view folder" link and automatically join in. or, at least, an "i accept" button with an accesskey for example alt+a, or command+a if using mac, to automatically join Now, there is one more procedure to accept invitation. if you are not logged in, of course e-mail and password are asked. you click "view folder" you click on "sharing" then, you click on "waiting invitation" then "i accept" it's too long and difficult! there should be a push notification also in the iPhone application so that iPhone users can accept or decline invite from there (on the macbook, notification arrives but i don't know how to get through that). Then, another interesting feature, should be the ability to share folders directly from the client. iPone client, and also desktop client. Now, you can right-click the folder. open dropbox submenu, then click "share folder"; but from there, safari opens with the dropbox site. and it's not always easy to enter e-mail addresses. sometimes screen reader's focus jumps out it should be interesting if without opening safari, the invitation e-mail addresses can be written directly in a client's normal, standard and accessible window and not using the web bruser or, better, it opens a standard e-mail window with subject and body pre-compiled and then you can put To: CC: CCN and so on and customize body if needed, but it always uses mac/windows/iOS/android email client thanks

By Piotr Machacz on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 01:24

The preferences screen on windows could work a lot better. Right now there is no way to move between the tabs with the keyboard. You can tab to the tab control, but the usual keys arrows, control+tab don't work. Also, you actually need to click on the system tray icon to open the menu. What I mean, before, you could just go to the system tray, and press the applications key ont he dropbox button to open the menu. Now, you actually have to do a mouse click to do this. Something else that would be useful is sound alerts or a notification i=when a big upload or download is done.

By Unregistered User (not verified) on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 01:24

I am with Alex Wallis on the syncing thing. It would be really great to be able to sync entire folders to my phone without having to do individual files. One example: I use my dropbox app to listen to audiobooks, and mp3s of tv shows. If I'm going to be on the go and not near my computer, it would be nice to put an entire book on my phone at one time. Hope this helps

Cemaury, that's exactly the case I was thinking of. I usually fill my phone completely with audio books, but would then like to be able to sync a hole folder to my phone and treat dropbox a bit like cloud storage, its so annoying as the pc client can do this, so surely it can't be hard to add into the iPhone client. I would top my phone up from dropbox as I finish books.

By Vincent on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - 01:24

Hello Chris , i just found out that on the iPad app (version 2.0.2) the buttons to navigate are not accessible. When VO is turned on the buttons on the left side of the screen; 'Dropbox', 'Photos', 'Favorites' and 'Settings' are not found. I don't have this problem on the iPhone. Please make this known to the people at Dropbox. Thank you. Vincent