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Automated accessibility testing at Slack

slack.engineering

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Re: Automated accessibility testing at Slack

#11

Post by gostsamo »

scoot wrote: post #10
gostsamo wrote: post #8

Slack have a rather good a11y experience. The few bugs that I've reported had been addressed rather promptly. The ux is also good with obvious consideration given to keyboard navigation. There are a few annoyances which separate it from perfect, but I rather like the app, especially compared to teams.

> Slack have a rather good a11y experience But yet they hijack the standard Cmd-Z “insert link” shortcut for search, so you have to use their non-standard alternative. Not good.

IMHO, one or even a few suboptimal things do not invalidate all the rest.

Re: Automated accessibility testing at Slack

#13

Post by password4321 »

gostsamo wrote: post #8

Slack have a rather good a11y experience. The few bugs that I've reported had been addressed rather promptly. The ux is also good with obvious consideration given to keyboard navigation. There are a few annoyances which separate it from perfect, but I rather like the app, especially compared to teams.

> I rather like the app, especially compared to teams

Pretty sure just about every other option is pretty likeable compared to Teams!

Re: Automated accessibility testing at Slack

#14

Post by dbjorge »

I am one of the maintainers of the axe accessibility testing engine the Slack team is using. It's awesome to see such a detailed writeup of how folks are building on our team's work!

We publish the engine (axe-core) and the "core" playwright integration library Slack is using (@axe-core/playwright) as open source, but if you're interested in what the Slack team has described in this blog, we also have a paid offering called axe Developer Hub (https://www.deque.com/axe/developer-hub) that offers a similar workflow to what the Slack folks describe here: It hooks into end-to-end tests you already have to add in accessibility testing without needing a ton of code changes to your test suite.

It's very enlightening to see which features the Slack folks prioritized for their setup and to see some of the stuff they were able to do by going deep on integration with Playwright specifically. It's not often you are lucky enough to get feedback as strong as "we cared about enough to invest a bunch of engineering time into it".

If you're interested in building these sort of accessibility tools, my team is hiring! https://www.deque.com/careers/senior-accessibility-tool-deve...

Re: Automated accessibility testing at Slack

#17

Post by pamelafox »

If you are writing tests with pytest, I wrote these blog posts about combining pytest, playwright, and axe-core: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2023/07/automated-accessibility-au... http://blog.pamelafox.org/2023/08/accessibility-snapshot-tes...

Great to see Slack using a similar combo!

Re: Automated accessibility testing at Slack

#18

Post by eitally »

password4321 wrote: post #13
gostsamo wrote: post #8

Slack have a rather good a11y experience. The few bugs that I've reported had been addressed rather promptly. The ux is also good with obvious consideration given to keyboard navigation. There are a few annoyances which separate it from perfect, but I rather like the app, especially compared to teams.

> I rather like the app, especially compared to teams Pretty sure just about every other option is pretty likeable compared to Teams!

Yet there are Teams features that nobody else has emulated yet and which quickly become almost indispensable for business use. I'll name two:

1. Teams automatically creates a chat group for every Teams calendar event. This can include external attendees.

2. Teams is useful for chat & meetings, but Teams spaces are hugely helpful as document repositories, too, and it's additionally easy to add things like Gantt charts and other enriched content types through add-ins.

And a bonus one:

3. The ability to seamlessly transfer a Teams meeting connection between arbitrary devices (laptop -> desktop, phone -> laptop, etc).

Re: Automated accessibility testing at Slack

#19

Post by quectophoton »

They still have that 3-4 second delay during login though. I open Slack directly from a browser, I login from a browser, yet I have to wait until they decide to ask me if I really want to continue with the browser I've been using for literally all the steps so far.

It's not much but it feels like when I'm on YouTube with a device that doesn't have adblock and a short ad plays before the video.

It's not related to accessibility, but it's still UX.

Re: Automated accessibility testing at Slack

#20

Post by gostsamo »

eitally wrote: post #18
password4321 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I rather like the app, especially compared to teams Pretty sure just about every other option is pretty likeable compared to Teams!

Yet there are Teams features that nobody else has emulated yet and which quickly become almost indispensable for business use. I'll name two: 1. Teams automatically creates a chat group for every Teams calendar event. This can include external attendees. 2. Teams is useful for chat & meetings, but Teams spaces are hugely helpful as document repositories, too, and it's additionally easy to add things like Gantt charts…

Additional feature of Teams is that their web app refuses to work on my firefox after working until two months ago. I'm not a heavy business user and the casual experience with this thing is pretty annoying.
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