Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Accessibility of chat applications (self.Blind)
submitted by frederik1991
Hi, I work for a company that provides a chat platform that gets integrated into customers' websites and mobile apps, and I'm working on making it more accessible. I'm visually impaired myself, so I already know what works well and what doesn't in many cases, but I'd be curious to hear from others. What issues do you run into when using chat applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or even customer support chat on a website.
One specific issue I'm currently thinking about is how screen readers announce replies. For instance, WhatsApp reads replies like this:
> Replying to a message from {original sender}:
> Message from {reply sender}:
> {reply message}
but it doesn't read the original message and has no clear way to navigate back to the original message. Are there other chat applications that do this well?
But to reiterate, the above issue is just one aspect I'm interested in, all thoughts on chat accessibility are welcome.
One specific issue I'm currently thinking about is how screen readers announce replies. For instance, WhatsApp reads replies like this:
> Replying to a message from {original sender}:
> Message from {reply sender}:
> {reply message}
but it doesn't read the original message and has no clear way to navigate back to the original message. Are there other chat applications that do this well?
But to reiterate, the above issue is just one aspect I'm interested in, all thoughts on chat accessibility are welcome.
retrolental_morose 5 points 1y ago
I agree with u/Fridux 19.
* Get a sound for a message coming in.
* Ensure the messages are navigable with screen readers, ideally with something separateing them (put them in different paragraph tags, use a heading for each, put them as list items. something)
* a Javascript-powered hotkey to read the last message, or keys to read the last few, would be nice.
* don't trigger reading of everything that's gone before with a new message
* indicate when a message has been sent as well as received
* Get a sound for a message coming in.
* Ensure the messages are navigable with screen readers, ideally with something separateing them (put them in different paragraph tags, use a heading for each, put them as list items. something)
* a Javascript-powered hotkey to read the last message, or keys to read the last few, would be nice.
* don't trigger reading of everything that's gone before with a new message
* indicate when a message has been sent as well as received
Fridux 5 points 1y ago
I've always found chat services to be rather annoying to use blind so I stay clear of them. My biggest pet peeve with chat services is that their asynchronous nature makes it possible for other people to message me while I'm typing, causing me to miss what was just said and forcing me to either read the chat history in reverse chronological order, or even worse, from the beginning of the conversation. To solve this I recommend playing a sound when the first unread message is received, queueing all the incoming messages and reading them once I'm done typing, and providing shortcuts to quickly focus my own messages in the chat history.
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