You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
We’ve been keen users of Hackpad here in the UK Government for a few years now. We would like to migrate to Dropbox Paper, but it’s not currently accessible using a screen-reader.
We have vision impaired users who rely on screen-readers and we have a responsibility to support them.
We’ve looked at the code and the main issue appears to be that the application role is applied to the entire UI. This causes screen readers to stop intercepting keyboard commands and pass them back through to the browser instead.
The upshot is that a screen reader is stripped of its usual shortcuts and navigational commands, making the app unusable unless scripting is used to provide the expected keyboard support.
Collaboration tools like Paper can have a huge impact on the lives of people with access needs, but only if they're built to support the full range of technologies that people use.
Working in government on designing services, I need to be able to access knowledge being shared by colleagues across government and also take part in the discussions. As a screen reader user I struggle to do this with both Hackpad and Paper. I'm sure as a business you'd like your products and services to be used by as many people as possible, including those who have access needs.
