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.
- Emmet
Community Manager
Status changed:InvestigatingtoAccepted Agreed. Please fix this ASAP, Dropbox.
Hi Chris, thanks for the feedback - I'd like to get a better sense of which specific items we need to look at so we can improve the document creation process as soon as possible.
On the Dropbox Paper website, in lower right-hand corner there is a "?" Help button that let's you submit feedback. Can you write in a ticket, so we can follow up offline?
Thanks!
Scott
- Now that Paper is out of beta does this mean the accessibility issues have been addressed? I have a blind person on my globally distributed team and am looking for tools that can help us collaborate. If anyone has experience they can share (e.g. works with a certain OS/browser) that would be really helpful.
Has there been any progress on this?
Thanks for dealing with the application role, it has enabled me to get a little further into the service. Sadly there are still numerous issues, as when viewing a paper document on the web, there are a number of unlabelled buttons and the example documents include images that don't contain alternative text.
I was unable to create a new document, as there are numerous unlabelled elements and I was not able to give the document a name. This was all attempted with VoiceoVer and Safari on Mac os 10.
Next, I downloaded the Paper app for iOS and was greeted with a welcome screen that I was unable to close or skip without sighted assistance, as the function is not exposed to VoiceOver. Once I got passed this blocker, the interface is much clearer than the web version, but sadly I am still unable to create my own content or edit existing content. There is also a button labelled 'Bar menu...' which enables me to share the document etc.
Happy to discuss offlist if you would like me to take part in further usability testing of your betas.
Hi Scott, thanks for your response. This is fantastic news - we'll take a look.
It's very encouraging to know that Dropbox is taking the needs of all its users seriously.
Hey Ed,
So it's been over a month and we've not had an update. Can you confirm whether this issue is going to be addressed or not, and if so, when?
Thanks
+1
Thanks for the response Ed - and let us know if we can be of any help. There are a lot of developers, designers and researchers here who'd be only too happy to pitch in.
- Ed
Dropbox Staff
Hi all,
Thank you so much for voicing your concerns here. Accessibility is very important to many of you and this is definitely something we have in our radar. I've passed this thread as part of the feedback to our the Paper team.
I'll let you know when I have updates.
Thank you
