Screen reader accessibility

[QuentinC]

Hi there,

I work for NV Access, makers of the NVDA screen reader, used by blind people around the world. One of our users has contacted us, as they need to use Proxmox, and are having trouble with it.

I wrote to the main office@proxmox.com email and got a reply from Martin Maurer saying they didn't do any accessibility testing on Proxmox and didn't see the need for it. Not a great response I must say!

Please tell me someone out there takes accessibility of Proxmox a bit more seriously?

If anyone is unfamiliar with screen readers and curious how they help a blind user navigate the PC, we have a quick video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCFyyqy9mqo

And if anyone would like to test proxmox with NVDA, we are also an open source project, and you can download NVDA here: https://www.nvaccess.org/download/

Kind regards

Quentin.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi,

wrote to the main office@proxmox.com email and got a reply from Martin Maurer saying they didn't do any accessibility testing on Proxmox and didn't see the need for it. Not a great response I must say!

As replied to your mail: That's completely out of context, assuming bad faith and not true at all.

We test accessibility, have a great CLI and API experience, which often is much more fruitful for people with accessibility needs and even tried to help/cooperate with NVDA in the past, even though it's only available at a proprietary platform.

Please stop jumping to all channels posting such things, that's really not nice, and we'd also rather welcome promoting software that actually runs on open and for all freely accessible systems like Linux too.

As said by martin and me, for all developer specific questions use the relevant channels:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Developer_Documentation

We hope to see patches from your project advancing the accessibility cause in Proxmox related projects soon, that'd be appreciated.

 

[martin]

I wrote to the main office@proxmox.com email and got a reply from Martin Maurer saying they didn't do any accessibility testing on Proxmox and didn't see the need for it. Not a great response I must say!

No, I did not wrote this, you are totally wrong here.

Seems you have problems to understand it. Read the email again.

 

[itNGO]

Hi there,

I work for NV Access, makers of the NVDA screen reader, used by blind people around the world. One of our users has contacted us, as they need to use Proxmox, and are having trouble with it.

I wrote to the main office@proxmox.com email and got a reply from Martin Maurer saying they didn't do any accessibility testing on Proxmox and didn't see the need for it. Not a great response I must say!

Please tell me someone out there takes accessibility of Proxmox a bit more seriously?

If anyone is unfamiliar with screen readers and curious how they help a blind user navigate the PC, we have a quick video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCFyyqy9mqo

And if anyone would like to test proxmox with NVDA, we are also an open source project, and you can download NVDA here: https://www.nvaccess.org/download/

Kind regards

Quentin.

Maybe you should first fix the Homepage of the company you work for, before crying about the Proxmox WebGUI....

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://www.nvaccess.org

 

[QuentinC]

I didn't get a chance to jump back on here last night and thank Thomas for clarifying that you do in fact test for accessibility, albeit mostly on Linux, which is mostly I asked in the first place. Martin's original email was extremely abrupt, and the dialog since has mostly been Marting & Thomas justifying why they are right rather than trying to get to the bottom of the issue my user is having.

Not very welcoming.

 

[t.lamprecht]

I didn't get a chance to jump back on here last night and thank Thomas for clarifying that you do in fact test for accessibility, albeit mostly on Linux, which is mostly I asked in the first place. Martin's original email was extremely abrupt, and the dialog since has mostly been Marting & Thomas justifying why they are right rather than trying to get to the bottom of the issue my user is having.

Not very welcoming.

I think you reversed things here. You never actually mentioned the issue your user is facing, what you did though was, and I really don't care about being right, I just want to develop things, so stating this the last time here to avoid a false picture for possible readers:

1. Reply in bad faith when Martin tried to immediately establish communications with developers directly, to discuss and ideally fix any such issue, as that's how we do things at Proxmox. For that, you jumped to the assumption that we do not do any accessibility testing and then further escalated things with wordings like "POS Software".
2. Then, once I pointed out your misunderstanding due to assuming the worst possible interpretation of the mail, you initially apologized, which I hoped was a turn around, leaving that initial misunderstanding aside, and the time to actually get some work done, iow. find out what the issue(s) actually are and discuss it on developer channels. But, it seems you felt that you rather needed to search blame for your misjudgment on our side, replying trying to pick a part and justify why you're right, while still, to this very moment, never ever bothering to actually name the issue your user faces! And now you try to call us out for "justifying why they are right rather than trying to get to the bottom of the issue my user is having", wth?!

And with that reversal of things you naturally force us to either not answer, implying that this was true, or reply with the facts and implying that yes, we try to be right - but I don't care about that and am allergic to getting blamed for not trying to help but being right while, as said, still not knowing the actual issue from your user, so…

Sorry, but we don't have the time to play such games anymore. If you got an issue then please report it, ideally let developers from your project do that, as from the current communication that seems much more fruit full for all of us to actually get to know what the issue is, and hopefully actually do something about it, if we can. Your devs may actually have an idea about the issue and its details and hopefully be able to communicate effectively with other software projects without needs for blame game or jumping to conclusions. I definitively won't have any hard feelings left and would I'd appreciate, if there is actually something reasonable we can do to improve things.

But, to be straight with you, if you still don't feel like actually communicating the issue, but continue doing some questionable PR stunt/blaming here then, we'll just close the thread and continue with actually developing something - there are other free and open source screen readers after all, like orca, which also runs on Linux, and thus we can use natively to test.

 

[QuentinC]

I've never seen such unprofessional behaviour. I will certainly not be recommending software developed by such rude people.

Good day sir

 

[schoeppi]

Hi,

old thread, but important for me and also Quentin I think...

I am also a blind computer user and we use Proxmox at work. I am using my computers with a screen reading software, NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on a Mac and Orca on Linux (this system I use the most).

For me the webinterface of the current Proxmox version is also inaccessible in most situations. The biggest problems are:

* It is not visible to screen reader users which elements are clickable. For that reasons it is not possible to open menus, the details of a VM, and so on.
* Many elements in the interface are constantly refreshing, e.g. to show the ressource comsumption of the VMs. This refreshings cause some screen readers to read the page from the beginning again and again or cause the screen reader to reread the site constantly which slows down the system. It would be helpfull to turn of those constantly refreshing elements e.g. in the account settings.
* In general the tree view, or however the page layout can be called, is not easy to navigate with a screen reading software. I am sorry I can't explain it more detailed, I'd have to show it to demonstrate the problems.

My workaround is to not use the webinterface at all and work directly on the shell of our cluster nodes. As long it is possible to have a shell command for all things that can be done of the webinterface thats OK for me, its even the prefered way I like to work. But the problem is that many things or tutorials are only showing how things can be done via the webinterface and also not everyone has the knowletge to work in shell only environments. So having a accessible webgui would make things much easier...

If you are interested what are the problems with the webinterface and why it not can be used with a screen reader I'd be happy to show you via a Teams session or in a personal meeting if you like. I am in Munich, so maybe a meeting is possible somewhen in future.

However, I'd be really happy to help to make the webinterface more accessible. So if you have questions, have something to test, need demonstration how blind people work with a screen reading software and so on, please let me know.

BTW.: Nvda is a free screen reader for Windows and Orca for Linux is also free. Everyone can install systems with this screen reading solutions to test how things are working. I can also help if you have questions regarding this issues.

Ciao and servus from Munich,

Schoepp

 

[magicfab]

I've asked this again, I didn't find this post earlier.

Here's my post today : https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/is-proxmox-accessible-for-blind-users.136878/