Are you or do you know a visually-impaired JIRA user?

[Penny Wyatt (On Leave to July 2021)]

UPDATE - thanks to all the people who have contacted me about this. We now have a great group of visually impaired JIRA users who are helping us to improve our accessibility, and an internal accessibility group. If you have accessibility questions or feedback, please send them to accessibility@atlassian.com rather than directly to me, as my role has changed. Thanks!

Hi folks! I'm the JIRA QA Team Lead and I have recently been spending my 20% time investigating improving the accessibility of JIRA for visually-impaired users.

As QA, one important part of my role is user advocacy. When it comes to visually impaired users, I haven't been giving these users' needs the attention they deserve during feature development - not maliciously, but through ignorance.

I have been doing my resesarch, and there are hundreds of pages and tools on the web about the technical specifics of the various accessibility standards, but what I'm missing is the information about what it's actually like to use JIRA non-visually, what pain points users are experiencing, and what the daily impact of not fixing these issues is.

Of course, I can install screen-reading software and explore, but I would prefer to meet the needs of real people, rather than arbitrarily decide for myself what people need and then deliver that.

So, if anyone here is, or knows a visually-impaired JIRA user, and is willing to assist me in understanding this portion of our userbase, I would greatly appreciate your assistance. (NOTE: As per comment above, this is no longer the case. Please do not contact me directly about this. Thank you!)

[HermannS · Accepted solution]

Hello Penny!

I know a blind JIRA-user. She is using our Ticketing-System with a screenreader (Jaws) and a braille-line.

I have to tell she is quite unhappy with JIRA. Those Javascript-based menus, the graphical (i.e. not "visible" using braille-line or screenreader) parts (e.g. that small triangle at the "Attachment" headline of an issue-view) and some more do not help making her life easy.

We tried to help her by configuring and installing a keyboard-shortcut plugin. But that interferes with the screenreader which has its own keyboard-shortcuts. So she has to enter a three key sequence to make a shortcut happen in JIRA.

To be honest I am not sure if she is willing to get in contact with you personally. But maybe I am able to search my notes and talk to here again to give you a better and updated list of problems she has.

Greetings

Hermann

[Penny Wyatt (On Leave to July 2021)]

Thanks Hermann - any information she is willing to provide would be gratefully accepted.

[Jaclyn Mazzarella]

Hi Atlassian Community! I know this question is pretty dated, but I wanted to provide a recent answer to anyone looking for one! 

Our app for Jira and Confluence is a great option for visually impaired users! Hope this helps anyone in need! 

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=unstoppable

[Chris Vaillancourt]

Hi @Jaclyn Mazzarella I was wondering if this is continuing to be updated through regular development cycles?

[Jaclyn Mazzarella]

Hi @Chris Vaillancourt it does! Check us out on the Atlassian Marketplace.

[bjorn.trollmo@eliassoftware.com]

Hello!

I know this thread is very old, but if it is still relevant we have a blind person at my office, and we are using JIRA, he is also having major issues with it. Especially as we are using it for agile, and he currently has no way of completing or reading tasks in a decent manner. I will be looking to see if I can use your API acess to solve this, but it'd be great if it was part of JIRA itself.

Greetings

Björn