Hi folks – I’m project lead for Matrix & Element here. We take accessibility very seriously, and particularly when Mozilla migrated from IRC to Matrix in 2020, we spent ages working with the Mozilla a11y folks (Marco Zehe at the time) ensuring that our screen-reader support in Element was better than Slack. Concretely, the Element bugtracker shows we’ve closed off 213 a11y issues on Element Web (https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues?q=is%3Aissue+label%3Aa11y+is%3Aclosed) and we’re working through the higher priority remaining open ones.

This isn’t just because prioritising a11y is the right thing to do; given most of Element’s paying customers are governments, there are legal obligations to be WCAG 2.1 AA or better compliant (we aim for AAA) – so if there are specific issues are causing problems, please flag them here (or ping me on github as @ara4n) and I will make sure they get looked at rapidly.

Meanwhile, on mobile, we’re just finishing Element X (rewrite of the mobile apps on iOS & Android), which should have absolutely best in class a11y thanks to leaning on all the latest SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose infrastructure from Apple & Google – e.g. VoiceOver support on iOS should be perfect; likewise dynamic text and similar.

In terms of Alex Stine’s feedback:

“I hope some of these issues are no longer problems,” Stine said in response to Kirk sharing the article. “If they still are, this would be no doubt a far worse experience than Slack was in some of its worst times.”

Can someone please point me to where that conversation is happening so we can figure out which issues are being referred to?

thanks!