I posted on the old message board about the need for screen reader accessibility and spoke with @JackVaughan briefly over the phone about accessibility needs. It seems like either you all have put in some work in meeting WCAG standards or VoiceOver on iOS just works better with PWAs. Whereas I used to not be able to navigate much of the content in a glide app with VoiceOver, I am now able to get most of the information from the content and controls!
Areas for improvement:
Images are automatically tagged with a generic, machine-created description, but true accessibility would mean that content creators would be able to add their own alt tags to images. Would you want today’s AI creating your visual experience?
Images read out random filename text before the actual alternative text description (alt tag). I’m not sure how to do it, but there needs to be some kind of code that tells the screen reader to ignore the filename and only read the alt="" text.
Overlays like the Comments posting area and the Edit page area seem to be appended to the end of the DOM, because I am still able to navigate whatever content I was at previously WHILE the Comment or Edit screen is up. I should not be able to navigate content that is not currently on the screen. This stack overflow article talks about something similar.
Thanks for this post. I am looking at potentially using Glide as a medium for some collaborative work with the Computer Science Teachers Association, but cannot do so if it is not accessible. Hopefully improvements will be made in short order.
Last time I tried the overlays with VoiceOver on iOS, it did seem like the issue with the screen reader accessing components of the previous page is fixed. I’m not positive on this, but I’m hoping the Glide devs put a little work into it.
I’ve not seen any improvement in this area, but I am not as plugged in as I used to be with this product. I still believe it’s a great product, and I would love to be able to use some of my glide apps with blind friends.
I was asked if Glide aligned with “RGAA” requirements (a French acronym) and I had to answer I would do my research as I had no idea.
The question has to do with Web accessibility standards. Different regions have slightly different requirements apparently, though they are roughly all similar:
International: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
European Union: European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the EN 301 549 (“Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services”)
United States: Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
Question: Is Glide compliant with WCAG or the European Accessibility Act for instance? If it’s not the case, any chance we could get a few features in that direction?