I am really curious how the French government will get away with using Matrix/Riot in all their govt agencies. They'll either have to ignore people with disabilities, or they'll have to contribute a huge amount of work to the Matrix project, both the web front-end and the iOS and Android clients. Because for a blind screen reader user, Matrix is far from being usable efficiently right now.
And no, I don't have time to contribute to all of these projects. I can't fight all fights.
@shel For blind users, everything is a plain site with only some buttons, many clickable non-semantic divs, and hardly any landmarks to get oriented properly, like what's a side bar, what's a navigation menu, what's the main content, and others. And the iOS and Android clients have their own share of issues.
@marcozehe oh yes i'm sure that anyone who put no effort into contrast ratios isn't using their ARIA roles or proper anchoring either.
@shel or even just proper semantic markup. :) Doesn't even have to be WAI-ARIA to make things accessible, many HTML elements, when used correctly, bring accessibility for free because browsers have proper implementation. WAI-ARIA is really only needed for fancy stuff that's not part of HTML.
@marcozehe Matrix is an open platform and there are a dozen clients available, some of which surely solve this problem.
For example there is a plugin for Weechat which is a text-only IRC client. You can connect to matrix.org through weechat and surely a screen reader could work with that.
Riot is only popular because it's the most feature-packed client, but it's certainly not the only choice.
@marcozehe I was expecting that the French government would invest in making a more user-friendly client application that looks like WhatsApp or Telegram. I hope that if they do, they take care of accessibility.
Riot is not user-friendly enough for the average non-technical user right now. I only use it because it has encryption features that I can trust (or have no reason to doubt).
#Matrix needs both a server with better performance and a client with a better user experience.
@marcozehe the Government of Canada is trying to use Rocket.Chat. I am trying to guide them through the process of contributing to open source projects.
@mgifford very cool!
@mgifford
I have been experimenting with zulip - do you have an opinion on zulip vs. rocket?
@marcozehe @deejoe how's matrix through weechat?
@marcozehe agreed!! main reason I don't use Riot is because the contrast ratios are horrible and it's difficult for me to read and my eyes aren't even that bad