What a VoiceOver Accessibility SNAFU Taught Us
Some unplanned issues reared their ugly heads, but we’re committed to getting accessibility right.
There are some hard days where you just want to give up. Everybody has them and we’re no different. It’s how you handle these days that matters and while the VoiceOver rollout didn’t go exactly as planned, we’re taking this opportunity to learn and improve the Dabel platform.
While we’ve discussed the importance of making accessibility an enhancement, not an afterthought, we wanted to share some of the things we’ve learned from the Dabel 2.0 release.
These are the lessons we learned the hard way, but we’re so glad we did.
It’s Not an Open Platform If It Isn’t Accessible
Our mission from the beginning is to give people a comfortable place to talk and be themselves, who otherwise don’t have a safe place to go. We want it to be a place of warmth and acceptance.
It’s hard to share this vision if the app is hostile to some users who rely on VoiceOver and screen readers to use the app.
It isn’t “set it and forget it.”
Like building the product itself, accessibility is a continuous process of learning, testing, and building. We do the best we can to build a great product before we release it, but the process continues after users start to use it and give us real-life insight.
While this could sometimes feel tedious, this is also a great chance for users to make a meaningful impact to the overall direction of development!
The app can’t be fun if it isn’t easy to use
Getting everything labeled and put in its proper place in VoiceOver is important, but stopping there feels incomplete. Making users look for that mute button you use in every lounge or swiping through a bunch of options just to get to that “Follow” button just starts to feel like a chore.
We plan to add the Magic Tap gesture for muting your mic during lounges, but we want to continue incorporating convenient gestures to make using Dabel with VoiceOver more intuitive.
As always, we appreciate everyone’s candid feedback and patience as we continue to improve Dabel. Submit any issues you encounter while using Dabel on dabelbeta.com/feedback, so we can get the necessary information to fix it.
