6/30/2023 0 Comments Slack for mac os![]() ![]() These differences do become clear very quickly once you take time to compare the Slack app on Mac vs iOS - the iOS app uses a native user interface, navigating with default VO gestures works as expected and is super painless, whereas the macOS variant can be a hassle to use especially in large workspaces with lots of active channels, threads, mentions and private messages. While this probably works well, wouldn't it be great if all these areas were interactable containers that you could quickly navigate across using VO, interacting with them as needed? That would probably make experienced VO users feel right at home, alleviating the need of getting used to an app-specific navigation paradigm. This leaves it up to developers such as Slack to go in and spend lots of time and energy on making their Electron-based apps more accessible, however the end result is always going to fall short of what you could do with a native app.Īs a simple example, the blog post mentions the introduction of a new shortcut, F6, which moves focus between the various sections of the app such as the list of channels and messages / threads. I'm sure the developers of this framework are trying their best to improve things like native accessibility support and improved keyboard navigation, but when you have a framework which supports a variety of different operating systems which all come with their own design principles, limitations and different stages of Chromium support, what they have to do is shoot for the lowest common denominator to maintain platform cross compatibility. ![]() While this approach does make things a lot easier for Slack developers (they only have one unified codebase to work with across all operating systems, therefore reducing development cost), Electron, which in turn is based on Google's Chromium engine, only offers limited built-in accessibility support compared to native UI frameworks such as SwiftUI or AppKit. The app was built using the Electron framework, meaning that this is essentially a website with some extra features packaged up as an app bundle so that it can run natively on macOS, Windows and perhaps even Linux. There is, however, one major pitfall to the Slack desktop app which results in the app being rather cumbersome to use with VO. First of all, I'd like to say it's great that Slack seems committed to improving the accessibility of their desktop app, I'm sure the changes mentioned in the blog post will be of some use to those Mac VO users needing to use it. ![]()
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