Worldwide, enterprises have an abiding commitment to accessibility. They need to ensure that their products, services, workplace, and culture welcome & support people with all disabilities. They are required to constantly work towards creating products and experiences that can be used by employees and customers alike.
Accessibility challenges that affect organizations
Most software products available on the market today have been designed and developed without visual impairment in mind. These products often come with several accessibility barriers that make them almost impossible for the visually impaired to use.
Accessibility teams across every sector are working to create powerful experiences for visually impaired users. However, most teams are often demotivated because of the lack of accessible internal tools. This is especially true for development organizations with teams composed of mostly visually impaired professionals. In addition, government mandates, regarding accessibility are getting stronger day by day. Most recently, the updated European web accessibility directive.
Although user interfaces of apps, tools, and websites have evolved considerably over time, screen reader apps have not kept up the pace. Most of these screen readers often struggle to draw information out of images and videos or provide smooth navigational journeys. In the absence of accessible features, employees, and contractors fail to drive real outcomes from their projects.
Introducing Unstoppable
As the world continues to work remotely, allowing people with visual disabilities to work just as efficiently as sighted users, has become extremely important.
Unstoppable, an Atlassian app for the visually impaired, enables a seamless experience while using Atlassian Jira, Jira service desk, and Confluence. Using advanced keyboard shortcuts, and implementation with top screen-readers, it expands the tool’s accessibility and empowers users to work more efficiently and productively.
Unstoppable allows visually impaired users to pinpoint actual tasks inside of the Atlassian toolset. It makes it easy for them to do the same work as their sighted peers and allows greater usage of DevOps tools by:
- Reading out attributes to users and empowering them to take the right action
- Delivering simple and easy navigation using intuitive keyboard strokes
- Allowing more users to use Jira and Confluence products and maintaining the productivity of day-to-day activities
- Ensuring legal compliance with 508, a11y & WCAG 2.1 laws and requirements
- Allowing users who are not completely visually impaired but need screen readers or magnified content to use the tools easily
Unstoppable automatically detects visual impairment
Developing products with interfaces for the visually impaired requires organizations to learn about the disability levels of their employees or customers. However, in many countries, it is illegal to ask someone about their disability and then discriminate against them based on the fact that they are visually impaired.
Although visually impaired users can simply ask their Admins to enable the app by adding them to the accessibility group, Unstoppable makes it possible for such users to activate features and leverage the tools on their own.
Users can:
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Enable the auto-detect feature by logging into Jira and using the hotkey Ctrl+Alt+U, which will automatically bring up the accessibility dialog box that can then be enabled or disabled.
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Allow auto-detection of the accessibility feature by pressing the “Tab” or “Shift+Tab” key in quick succession on the dashboard, issue screen, backlog, or agile board.
- Navigate to the headers from JAWS or NVDA screen readers, and select the enable Unstoppable add-on option.
As accessibility becomes a core business priority, Unstoppable allows a visually impaired user to be easily connected to non-disabled colleagues in a remote and in-office environment. With its structure, numerous capabilities, and accessibility to frequently used desktop screen readers, our app empowers disabled users to have full control of their Atlassian tools.
Want to know how you can leverage Unstoppable’s capabilities?
