Accessibility for the Blind

Hello,

I am a blind user of Mattermost through work. I use Windows 10 with a popular (also open-source) program called NVDA. A couple of months ago, our systems administrators upgraded the MM server to 5.11, which worked incredibly well for me. However, this past weekend, they upgraded to 5.15, and now it’s almost unusable for me and cumbersome as best.

It’s difficult to try to explain what changed to someone who does not utilize a screen reader, which I’m assuming no one here does, but I will try. When viewing a web-based application, like Mattermost, either through a web browser or stand-alone web app, NVDA formats the page in what they call document review mode. Up until 5.15, this was true of Mattermost. Now, however, NVDA does not go into document mode, and it’s the only program of it’s kind that NVDA refuses to see in this mode through any web browser I try. I’ve cleared cookies, cache, etc., and it’s not that. I had an old binary of the Mattermost client (I think 3.x), but installing this made no difference.

So my question is, what changed between 5.11 and 5.15 with the overlying interface? Is there a way for blind people to view a Mattermost server in a simple, basic HTML format?

Thank you.

Hi @Garypair, we recently added a keyboard accessibility feature in v5.14 (https://docs.mattermost.com/help/getting-started/accessibility.html). I’m not sure if the changes you are seeing might be related to the new feature or not.

I will forward your feedback to our team and see if they have knowledge about this issue.

We opened a Jira ticket to investigate this further: https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-18672.

@Garypair are you open to having a conversation with us to discuss this further? We’d like to understand more about your workflow and how you expect the screen reader to behave and navigate the app. If interested can you please join us in the ~Accessibility channel in our community server and mention me @eric.sethna? https://community-release.mattermost.com/core/channels/accessibility