Dear friends, #screenreader users, #blind users and #accessibility professionals in particular.
Are you using chat over traditional email as provided by #DeltaChat / #DeltaLab / #ArcaneChat?
I like it uses traditional email infrastructure, is federated, supports end to end encryption, rich content including audio / voice messages. I have even recognized @adb has implemented screen reader accessibility specific features into the android app.
However I have quickly tried electron based app on linux with orca screen reader, exchanged a few messages back and fort between two of my personal accounts using the DeltaChat app and thunderbird and I haven't found the user experience verry appealing. I can't understand how to effectivelly navigate in the list of conversations and list of messages.
Therefore I would be interested to hear a few comments from people knowing this platform better. How accessible is it on different platforms?
On the desktop is the electron based app a prefered choice?
Also some other questions. For the best experience, do I need a new email address or can I use my existing self-hosted one I have already configured in thunderbird?
Ffeel free to point me to a FAQ, some up to date introductory documentation if you think my questions don't make much sense please.
in reply to WofWca

@WofWca Looking more it looks to me you are working on some amazing accessibility related improvements. While I was testing a few weeks ago I had issues navigating the lists. hmm, perhaps I need to figure out how to build with this PR and see for my-self if it might be related. github.com/deltachat/deltachat…

Edit: oh, there are more PRs resolving keyboard navigation and accessibility related issues. It's really right about perfect time I have discovered this thing.

Thanks and keep up the great work please

in reply to Peter Vágner

@WofWca So I have finally updated to the latest and greatest #deltachat desktop. And I must say I am really impressed.
Both lists, list of conversations and list of messages are now keyboard navigable.
The hint for the screen reader users is that not all of the screen readers may switch into focus mode automatically so once you do this manually you can enjoy the user experience the way it has been designed.
Also there are nice keyboard shortcuts e.g. ctrl+n for jumping into the input box, ctrl+k for search and more.
Now I do really need to explore more i.e. what about the encryption. Can I use my existing GPG key or add a subkey or is that handled transparently on the background? I need to figure out if I should create new email for chatting or use my primary email.
Still from the accessibility point of view we are really getting something usefull I think.
in reply to Peter Vágner

Note to my-self and other people like me:
Read the #deltachat help at delta.chat/en/help it's all perfectly explained there in easy to follow language. It's even translated to various different languages already.
The number one answer for me is that there are #deltachat specific so called #chatmail servers suitable for anonymous instant messaging over email.
So eventhough I like to self host my emails, I think I'll go with existing #chatmail server at least initially.

reshared this

in reply to devSJR

@devSJR If you have mostly or only "green-checkmarked" chats you can reconfigure your e-mail address to another server and then send a message to your contact which should update them. This will not migrate unencrypted or opportunistically encrypted chats, though, which is why we don't prominently recommend it. Another way is to create a new profile, and then add it to all relevant chats and remove the old profile. More cumbersome but also pretty failsafe.
in reply to Matthias

It is possible for #chatmail users to communicate with classic email users who have published their public key.

You just have to do manual chatmail registration, save your login details and private key securely, and use it with something that supports #pgp like #Thunderbird or #Mailvelope.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to WofWca

@WofWca Perhaps making sure parent of those list items has an attribute role="list" or if you are sure everything inside a particular DOM subtree has logical keyboard focus handling perhaps role="application" on encompassing parent element would do the ttrick. However it really has to be considered visely as it makes it more difficult for screen reader users do read parts of the UI that should behave like a document content by lines, by words and similar.