Comment by ndarilek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndarilek | Hacker News Reader

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Man, I don't know if I'm going to regret posting this tomorrow, but if folks at ZenHub are going to pop into this thread and promote themselves as a product developers are encouraged to switch to, as a blind developer, I wish they'd at least pay lip service to web accessibility best practices. As a blind screen-reader-using developer, I tried to use ZenHub as a contractor at my last gig and it was impossible. As in, I'm on my desktop doing a screenshare to my coworker across the country viewing my screen on his iPhone, and he's trying to tell me milimeter by milimeter how to move my mouse so I can dismiss one of your onboarding popups which I couldn't dismiss via keyboard on several OS's screen readers, only to be presented immediately thereafter by another. I couldn't use your broduct at all on my own until a sighted coworker helped me to dismiss your onboarding popups, then I found it hard and unintuitive how to navigate the interface as a screen reader user.

Not upset, just frustrated that I couldn't do my job, and I wish you'd done some basic accessibility testing on your interface. If that's a gap in your development staff, I'm currently looking for work. Just sayin'. :)

In any case, kudos for creating a quality product that folks I respect enjoy using. I hope that one day I can be among them.

Thanks for this feedback ndarilek, I appreciate you taking the time to call it out. Candidly, you're absolutely right—this is an area that we need to be more considerate of as we continue to scale and I apologize that it lead to a less than ideal first experience for you.

We've started down the path of completing an accessibility audit, and are hoping to use those findings to drive highest priority areas of improvement moving forward. While I'm not certain on timelines , I definitely think there could be an opportunity to engage moving forward and would be happy to keep you involved if you're interested.

If you'd like, you can reach me directly aaron@zenhub.com

Thanks, super happy to hear that! If I sound harsh, please understand that it's from the perspective of someone who starts out excited about how the latest and greatest startup will disrupt my life, only to realize that half of their app is unusable to me. When I raise any issues like this, the most I can usually hope for is "thanks for your comments, they made our day, unfortunately we have no intention of fixing these issues at this time." So when I encounter inaccessibility among developer-focused tools, and think about how unemployment among disabled folks hovers around 70%, it's hard not to be jaded, and frustrated about how making accessibility an afterthought makes employment a bigger challenge for some of us.

So I'm glad to hear that you're undergoing an audit, and I hope that I can someday count ZenHub among the developer tools I can use. FWIW, Slack isn't even in this group, which is shameful given they patted themselves on the back for such a keyboard-friendly interface when they killed off XMPP. No, I'm not bitter. :P

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