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deltachat / deltachat-desktop

Email-based instant messaging for Desktop.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Request to bring Delta Chat Desktop into compliance with web content accessibility standards #2845

Open bmivzkrp opened 2 years ago

bmivzkrp commented 2 years ago

Dear developers! First of all - thank you very much for Delta Chat. Could you improve the accessibility of Delta Chat Desktop so that blind users can comfortably use this great application? For Linux users, Delta Chat is also another Thunderbird alternative (there are very few email clients for Linux that support accessibility). Delta Chat Desktop currently has issues that make it difficult for blind users to use. For example - some elements do not have text descriptions (labels), some elements cannot be activated using the Enter key, and so on. so I have a request for you: could you bring Delta Chat Desktop into line with web accessibility standards? It is probably better to take the WCAG 2.1 standard as a basis, since WCAG 2.2 and WCAG 3.0 have not yet been approved. WCAG 2.1 link: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ WCAG 2.1 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmSM-Q0I6Dc Electronjs Accessibility Documentation: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/accessibility Many thanks for your attention to this issue.

Jikstra commented 2 years ago

We would love to see deltachat being compliant with this but sadly we currently don't have the resources and expertise to tackle this. Our current focus is on getting our backend working in rust so that deltachat can work in normal browsers too and isn't limited to electron. Sadly the electron accessibility tools are not that great from what I know and we could benefit from having all the tools other browsers like firefox support. Another problem currently is that our keybinding support (what would be needed for eg enter press) is very hacky and it can't distinguish between which dialogs are shown and on which level. So it's on our list of things to do but we have some more ground work to do. In case anybody wants to work on this right now we would love to give support and prs are of course very appreciated! It's not easy for us to say this, as it's something that hurts us. We would love to see accessibility as a fundamental part of deltachat, but currently we can't offer it but hope as soon as possible.

bmivzkrp commented 2 years ago

@Jikstra Thank you for your answer. I would also like to see Delta Chat in the form of a web interface. As a blind Linux user, I can say that sometimes certain accessibility regressions appear in Chromium, and then they move to Electron, and you have to wait for the developers to fix it, and then also for the moment when the developers of a certain application move it to a newer version Electron version. Anyway - if you bring future versions of Delta Chat to accessibility standards, I can help you in the context of user experience. You can ask me some things. If it s a technical point that I don t understand, I can ask the developers I know for help.

03.08.22 00:54, Jikstra пише:

We would love to see deltachat being compliant with this but sadly we currently don't have the resources and expertise to tackle this. Our current focus is on getting our backend working in rust so that deltachat can work in normal browsers too and isn't limited to electron. Sadly the electron accessibility tools are not that great from what I know and we could benefit from having all the tools other browsers like firefox support. Another problem currently is that our keybinding support (what would be needed for eg enter press) is very hacky and it can't distinguish between which dialogs are shown and on which level. So it's on our list of things to do but we have some more ground work to do. In case anybody wants to work on this right now we would love to give support and prs are of course very appreciated! It's not easy for us to say this, as it's something that hurts us. We would love to see accessibility as a fundamental part of deltachat, but currently we can't offer it but hope as soon as possible.