Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Feedbacks needed: Web chats and screen readers (self.Blind)
submitted by a11ydev
Hi #blind community,
I'm a developer who started accessibility consultancy recently and I am currently reviewing a live chat.
I have tested Voice Over with Chrome, Firefox and Safari.While not fully inaccessible, the experience was far to be enjoyable. Chrome and Safari reads the entire transcript from the beginning at any interaction, which also happens on Android Talkback, and Firefox doesn't annunciate the transcript at all.
Surprised with the results, I have tested other famous web chats like Intercom, Zendesk, Live Person, Qualified by Salesforce and some more custom once.
While supposed to be accessible as per WCAG recommendations and some improvements here and there for some, I am baffled to the poor experience and wonder how a screen reader user without sight would navigate.
I'm about to install NVDA and run further tests but I was wondering if people competent in this domain and/or first concerned users with vision impairments had some feedback to share as for example: what assistive technologies do you use, what are the recurrent issues you face, what would make it easier, which experience would you expect, are you seeking for alternatives instead ?
Thank you in advance :)
I'm a developer who started accessibility consultancy recently and I am currently reviewing a live chat.
I have tested Voice Over with Chrome, Firefox and Safari.While not fully inaccessible, the experience was far to be enjoyable. Chrome and Safari reads the entire transcript from the beginning at any interaction, which also happens on Android Talkback, and Firefox doesn't annunciate the transcript at all.
Surprised with the results, I have tested other famous web chats like Intercom, Zendesk, Live Person, Qualified by Salesforce and some more custom once.
While supposed to be accessible as per WCAG recommendations and some improvements here and there for some, I am baffled to the poor experience and wonder how a screen reader user without sight would navigate.
I'm about to install NVDA and run further tests but I was wondering if people competent in this domain and/or first concerned users with vision impairments had some feedback to share as for example: what assistive technologies do you use, what are the recurrent issues you face, what would make it easier, which experience would you expect, are you seeking for alternatives instead ?
Thank you in advance :)
CloudyBeep 2 points 2y ago
Web chats don't need much work to be accessible. Obviously, screen reader users need to be able to navigate through the message transcript, and any buttons that are present need to have meaningful labels. ARIA alerts should be used to announce when the other party is typing and the content of new messages that they post so that screen reader users don't need to be continually checking for new messages.
Can you mention a chat you tried that you didn't think was very accessible because it would be useful to get a screen reader user to give you their opinion of it?
Can you mention a chat you tried that you didn't think was very accessible because it would be useful to get a screen reader user to give you their opinion of it?
siriuslylupin6 1 points 2y ago
Depends on the chats some are good. Some are not. Some get a little confusing but you can read the messages. It all depends though on the chat. Not every chat reads out new messages some do and some don’t. I’ve had okay experiences with web chat.
bradley22 1 points 2y ago
Truth is, they're mostly shit. We can use them by going in and out of forms mode/focus mode, and reading the chat logs but they could be so much better.
Fridux 1 points 2y ago
I've had trouble using chats of any kind, both native and web based, ever since I went blind, so I'm probably not the best person to answer this. In any case in all my interactions with chat clients I have always missed the following features:
1. A read cursor independent from the screen-reader's cursor to read the chat window without having to move the focus away from the input text field;
2. Screen-reader announcements every time a new chat message is received or sent unless the read cursor is not at the latest message or the user is typing, in which case the reading should be delayed and a screen-reader content update event should be sent (not sure if this last part is possible to do on the web though);
3. Key bindings to move the chat cursor to the oldest, newest, previous, and next chat message;
4. Key bindings to mark and recall messages in the chat window using the read cursor, possibly allowing the user to recall the last N marked messages in chronological order;
5. Key bindings to read everything from marked positions to the latest message and set a new mark there;
6. A key binding to repeat the last screen-reader announcement triggered by the client and not by user actions.
1. A read cursor independent from the screen-reader's cursor to read the chat window without having to move the focus away from the input text field;
2. Screen-reader announcements every time a new chat message is received or sent unless the read cursor is not at the latest message or the user is typing, in which case the reading should be delayed and a screen-reader content update event should be sent (not sure if this last part is possible to do on the web though);
3. Key bindings to move the chat cursor to the oldest, newest, previous, and next chat message;
4. Key bindings to mark and recall messages in the chat window using the read cursor, possibly allowing the user to recall the last N marked messages in chronological order;
5. Key bindings to read everything from marked positions to the latest message and set a new mark there;
6. A key binding to repeat the last screen-reader announcement triggered by the client and not by user actions.
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