Request for accessibility improvements for Zotero software on the Mac, as well as for the website

Hello,

I am a visually impaired Mac user and I tried using Zotero, but encountered the following difficulty: some buttons and all the text fields are not clearly labeled.

What I mean is that, after creating a new item (with the help of the menu bar, because I cannot use the toolbar very well), when navigating through the elements on the screen with the specific VoiceOver shortcut (VO+left and right arrow) which refer to the information that I need to add (e.g. title, author etc.), only the prompts for the text fields are read, and when I interract with them, I can find only the text, not the edit boxes. Meanwhile, when navigating with the Tab key, I jump from box to box, but VoiceOver repeats the word "text" instead of informing me that this is where I should write the title or first name of the author etc. This also happens with the website. The interface is understandable for me, the issue only being the lack of labeled elements.

Therefore, I, and I am sure many other blind and visually impaired people, would very much appreciate if some accessibility improvements would be made in order to make the website and software usable for us without sighted assistance, which is not always available.
Thank you for reading this post and I am looking forward to hearing your opinion.
Regards,

Alexandra
  • For the desktop app, VoiceOver support is unfortunately currently pretty limited for technical reasons. We'll look again to see if there's anything we can do to improve it now, but mostly it will likely need to wait for future versions of the app after we update to a newer version of the framework Zotero is based on. JAWS on Windows should work a bit better currently.

    But both the web library and the new iOS beta app should would work well with any accessibility tool, so if you're having trouble with those, we'd want to know more. For the web library, are you using VoiceOver in Safari or another browser? You'd definitely want to use Safari for the best experience.

    If you have an iPad and you're not currently in the iOS beta, email us at support@zotero.org with a link to this thread and we can add you.
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