an open letter to dropbox, interface changes don't always mean it's accessible.

update: a response was received on March 14, 2013.
as a longstanding user of dropbox, I’ve grown to love it, from it’s ease of use, to it’s support on so many platforms, windows, mac, android, and iphone. So when 2.0.0 was early released and put up as the perminant stable download I thought nothing of it, until I noticed the right click menu was no longer accessible.
I did some research and noticed I wasn’t the only user experiencing this issue, and not the only OS effected, as the mac was effected as well.
I tested with JAWS, window-eyes and NVDA and got the exact same results.
So like so many others, I decided to compose an e-mail to dropbox support, asking them to please fix these issues. I post it below for your reading. The comment boards await you.

From: Shane Davidson
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 3:42 AM
To: ‘support@dropbox.com’
Subject: interface changes do not always mean accessibility.
Hello;
As a longtime user of dropbox, starting in 2009, and it’s paid service, becoming a paid user back in 2010, I’ve gotten used to storing important business and personal documents in the cloud, sharing folders with friends, and I referred people to your service since I highly recommended it.
It’s simplicity, ease of use, and ability to install it on everything, your computers, your iphone, your android, it was perfict.
Your recent doubling of paid users and adding more paid plans with more space screamed keep me, and I kept referring users, participating in contests, etc. earning more space.
Recently, you early released version 2.0.0 as a “stable” release to a select number of users, some of those users being totally blind that rely on screen access technologies, the three main ones being JAWS for windows from Freedom scientific, www.freedomscientific.com Window-eyes from GWMicro www.gwmicro.com and the free and open source NVDA www.nvda-project.org.
Reading your blog post at
https://blog.dropbox.com/2013/03/discover-the-new-dropbox-menu-on-your-computer/
and the forum post at
https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=97895
I saw you had changed your dropbox menu. Ok, no big deal, right? Still able to right click. Actually no. The old style menu we were used to was gone. Utterly gone. I thought there was an issue with my access technology, in this case JAWS, but after discussion with other users via twitter, facebook, and seing this topic on the forums
https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=97907&replies=1#post-533140
it seems that this is not the case and the latest version under both windows and mac, the menu is not accessible.
We still have the ability to move files around in explorer/finder depending on your OS, but this menu gave us access to the preferences, our space usage, recently changed files, and the ability if necessary to shut down the client if the need arose.
Myself, and others are begging, and imploring you to please, please fix this major accessibility issue before releasing to the public as a whole.
Your prompt attention to this matter would be greatly appreciated and a lot of users would thank you.
Your attention to this issue would show that a mainstream company is willing to listen to a group of people, and willing to keep accessibility in mind when making changes to a UI.
As a note, this e-mail, and any communications minus personally identifying information that may be included, will be posted as an open communication for all to read on my blog at
www.shaned.net
weather the feedback is positive or negative, it will be posted to the above linked blog to be read by all.
Thank you for your time and attention.

I and others await your comments. We’ll see what dropbox says in the coming days.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.