Cryptpad (https://cryptpad.fr), the E2E collaboration platform, has become even more usable now, with OnlyOffice user interface for documents and presentations! It now supports track changes and commenting. In other words: no more excuses to use Google docs ;-) Very nice!!
@xot I still have a strong (but sad) reason to use something else: CryptPad is extremely inaccessible.
I'm not talking about a level of inaccessibility where I could go file a few issues and they could fix them. Rather, it's demonstrably unusable with keyboard only, screen readers, and other accessibility tech. 0 out of 10, if you sent me a document I couldn't read it sort of accessibility.
Worth keeping in mind if you're not just using it for yourself, and you want a diverse audience of readers and collaborators.
@jscholes@xot@neil Hi, I'm from the cryptpad team. This is surprising because we are working on accessibility. We are tracking issues and working on them. Note that we have 10 document types so it would be useful to know which ones you would grade us that low.
@ldubost Under "New document" on the cryptpad.fr home page, I choose "Document". Once the editor loads, my focus lands in an unlabelled multiline editable area.
When I type in this area and try to read what I've written, NVDA (my screen reader) reports absolutely nothing. Essentially, the editor is always determined to be blank.
If I try to use the standard Tab and Shift+Tab keystrokes to move focus around the page, nothing happens. My focus is trapped inside the editor.
If I press Escape to use my screen reader's own cursor (called "browse mode"), I find: 1. An alert, "This pad is not in your CryptDrive.", at the bottom of the page. It has no accessible markup (like dialog) to indicate that it's a notification I can dismiss, and because focus didn't land in it, I had no idea it was here. I dismiss it with the "DON'T STORE" button, at which point keyboard focus is lost. 2. I now find another alert, "We need your help!", which likewise is not accessibly marked up. I dismiss this too, with "NOT NOW", and focus is lost again. 3. Now that these notifications have been dealt with, I manually return to the editor by pressing Tab a lot. NVDA still reports it as blank, and doesn't see any of the text that I type or paste. 4. Returning to the browse mode cursor, I look around the page and fine, among other things: 66 buttons with no accessible label, a menu bar ("File"/"Home"/etc.) with no accessible markup, menus in that bar that I don't seem able to open, unlabelled text fields for setting font attributes with no labels, disabled text inputs with no labels, and so on. 5. Trying to go back to the home page, I find that all keystrokes for moving to my browser's address bar (Alt+D, Control+K and Control+L) are prevented from working by the application. I have no choice but to close the tab instead.
Much of this is irrelevant because if I can't read the document I'm working on, the rest of the interface doesn't matter. And this level of inaccessibility isn't limited to this document type; for example when I create a new sheet instead, I find nothing resembling an interactive grid or table.
@jscholes Can you try "new rich text", the ones you are trying are the onlyoffice ones. It's possible we did not make it there, but I'll report it to the team @cryptpad @xot@neil
@ldubost From a very quick initial look, the rich text option does seem more promising, but quite a lot of the accessibility help is rendered inaccurate by bugs within the components.
For example, the Alt+0 dialog indicates that I can use the arrow keys to navigate editor toolbars and the context menu, but in both cases the arrow keys don't do anything. In the toolbars, the only option is inefficient tabbing, while I can't work out how to navigate the editor context menu at all.
Unfortunately I don't have time to test more today. @cryptpad
@ldubost Separately, if activating the first new "Document" option in a document editor navigates the user to a completely inaccessible UI, that is a wider usability problem. It's completely non-obvious that users should choose something else, and why inaccessible options are available and highlighted by appearing earlier on the page. @cryptpad