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.
Another vote to make Paper work better. What can we do to help?
If the application role was to fix screen readers not passing on needed keystrokes to Javascript, find those parts that had that particular trouble, separate them into test cases, and ask the accessibility community what workaround(s) there are. WebAIM mailing list for example is a great place to get feedback and ideas.
Let's make it accessible and available for everyone.
We'd love to use Dropbox paper as our collaboration tool - but unfortunately are unable to due to a number of accessibility issues, particularly that a number of our colleagues who use screen readers wouldn't be able to participate.
It makes business and marketing sense to have features accessible across the whole community
Dropbox Paper should envision a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability.
Please make accessible. The web should be able to be used by everyone
Please consider the value in making Dropbox Paper universally usable. Accessibility means more than just access.
Let us know if there's anything the community can do to help make Paper accessible, eg ideas to improve, test etc
The web is for everyone - by making Dropbox Paper more accessible we can use it across our teams, otherwise we have to look at alternatives.
We can't use a collaboration tool that excludes some of our most crucial team members, just because they happen to rely on screen-readers.
It would be lovely to be able to experiment with Dropbox Paper but right now, we can't even consider it.
Please fix this, Dropbox.
