Who can use this, and who cannot
This is an honest account rather than a compliance badge. Some of it is a list of things that work; some of it is a list of things that do not, and will not, because of what the feature is. Both are here on purpose: a statement that only claims successes tells a disabled person nothing they can plan around.
1. What we are aiming at
The target is WCAG 2.2 level AA. That is the level referenced by the Quebec government standard SGQRI 008, by the Accessible Canada Act’s technical guidance, and by the European Accessibility Act. We are not claiming to have reached it everywhere. Section 4 says where we have not.
This statement was last reviewed on the date at the foot of this page, against the version of the service then running. It is reviewed whenever the interface changes in a way that affects any of the claims below.
2. What works with a screen reader
The application is a single page that never reloads, which is precisely the shape that is hostile to a screen reader if nobody has thought about it. These are the things that were built for it:
Everything that happens is announced. A message arriving, a person joining or leaving, a file being offered, a transfer finishing, a safety number changing, an error — each is spoken through a live region. Two regions are used: an ordinary one that waits for a gap in speech, and an interrupting one reserved for the two events that are both urgent and time-limited — somebody knocking at the door, and a file waiting for an answer.
The room has a structure to move through. Headings, a main landmark named after whichever view is open, a labelled conversation log, and a skip link that jumps the dozen header controls.
Every control has a name, not just an icon, and the tab strip reports which tab is current rather than only looking current.
The safety number is words, not a picture. Verifying who you are talking to — the most security-critical thing in the application — was designed to be read aloud, which makes it one of the few such checks anywhere that works as well without sight as with it.
Keyboard only, throughout. No control needs a pointer, nothing traps focus, and no positive tabindex reorders the page out from under you.
3. Motion, contrast and text
Reduced motion is honoured everywhere. If your system asks for it, every animation in the application stops: the countdown digits swap instead of travelling, the loading indicators hold a single frame instead of turning, arrivals and departures appear and disappear, and the dissolve that plays when a room is burned is replaced by a plain fade. Nothing is merely slowed down.
Contrast was measured, not estimated. Every text pair in both themes meets WCAG AA; the tightest measured 4.78:1 in the light theme and 4.86:1 in the dark. Badges needed their own darker colours to get there, because coloured text on a tint of itself is a much harder problem than it looks.
Nothing depends on colour alone. A verified peer says “verified”; a mismatched one says “MISMATCH”; a file’s risk is a number and a sentence as well as a ring.
Text resizes. The layout is built in relative units and survives zooming to 200% without loss of content or function.
Forced colours — Windows high contrast mode — is handled: the effects that rely on painted backgrounds fall back to solid colours rather than disappearing.
4. What does not work, and will not
Three features of this service are visual in a way that cannot be translated, and pretending otherwise would waste your time:
The shared whiteboard. It is a drawing surface. A blind person cannot see what is drawn on it and cannot draw on it. There is no text equivalent, because there is no text — the content is strokes made by other people in real time. Everything else in the room works without it, and the room does not require anyone to open it.
Screen sharing. Watching somebody else’s screen is watching. The audio that may accompany a shared screen is played, and the fact that a share has started or stopped is announced, but the picture itself is not describable by this application.
The QR code. It is an image of a link. The link itself is always available as text and as a copy button beside it, so nothing is only reachable through the code.
Two smaller limits, stated because they are real: the file preview shown before you accept a transfer is a thumbnail for images, with no description available — the file name, size, type and full safety report are text; and the live throughput charts are decorative summaries of numbers that are also written out beside them.
5. How this was checked
The claims in section 2 were verified against the running application, not against the source: live regions were confirmed to carry real announcements, the landmark and heading structure was read out of the rendered page, every control was checked for an accessible name, and every form field for a label that is not merely a placeholder.
What has not been done, and should be before any claim of conformity is made: testing with real assistive technology by people who use it daily — NVDA and JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, TalkBack on Android — and a full audit by someone qualified. Automated checks and a careful developer find the absent label; they do not find the announcement that arrives at the wrong moment, or the one that arrives so often it has to be muted.
6. Telling us it is broken
If something here stops you doing what you came to do, write to [ACCESSIBILITY CONTACT]. Say what you were trying to do, what you were using — browser, operating system, assistive technology and version — and what happened instead. You do not need to diagnose it.
We aim to acknowledge within 5 business days and to give a plan or a fix within 30 days. Where a barrier is one of the three in section 4, we will say so plainly rather than leave you waiting for a fix that is not coming.
If the response does not satisfy you, in Quebec you may contact the Office des personnes handicapées du Québec (ophq.gouv.qc.ca), or the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse (cdpdj.qc.ca), which handles discrimination complaints based on a handicap under the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
Last reviewed:
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Obleevo is developed by The House of Brendrof. Proprietary software, free to use.