WCAG 2.0 Level AA (Accessibility)
AnsweredPlease consider making your visitor-facing chat widget accessible for visitors with physical impairments. US government websites are required to have websites that conform to WCAG 2.0 guidelines or Section 508 standards. Many businesses also find it important to be accessible to visitors with disabilities.
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Hi there Jee Shin,
Thanks for the feedback regarding the widget's accessibility and how it currently doesn't meet the WCAG guidelines.
The team are aware of some of the accessibility issues the widget has and a lot of the big problems will require some major rework that we are not able to do right now. As things stand right now, I don't foresee us conforming to all WCAG guidelines by next year.
Here is the link to the Section 508 document for Zendesk as a whole: https://www.zendesk.com/company/section-508-accessibility/
Thanks,
Ramin
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Hi Ramin,
This has also been requested by some of our customers. Has any progress been made on this?
Unfortunately the linked s.508 page does not mention Chat.
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Hi Jonathan,
We are slowly working on addressing accessibility issues but there is no initiative in 2017 to become WCAG 2.0 AA compliant.
We are exploring adopting some of ARIA in the widget in late 2017.
If you need a compliant widget today, you can use the Web SDK to build a widget experience that is compliant to your requirements.
You can get more info on the Web SDK at api.zopim.com/web-sdk
The Web SDK is available to customers on the Premium plan.
Thanks,
Ramin
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Hi Zendesk Team,
Just wondering if any further progress has been made on Accessibility or ARIA integration?
Regards,
Jason
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Hi Jason,
Zendesk is spending more resources on improving the accessibility of the end user touch points in Guide and Support product. This includes parts of the Web Widget but is not specific to the Chat component in the Web Widget. This is iterative work and will be released gradually throughout the year.
Currently, there is no commitment to increasing accessibility/ARIA integration in the Chat standalone widget experience for the rest of 2018.
Thanks,
Ramin
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Hey ZD Team!
A sizable chunk of our participating institutions are federally funded, and having services we offer be WCAG 2.0 compliant is becoming increasingly important.
Some of our top concerns include:
- level of contrast with the buttons
- Many screenreaders do not read the responses from the agents
- Zooming while not in full-screen will increase the widget to a size that blocks the rest of the screen
- Users cannot tab through the screen to get to chat widget
We appreciate the work done on the web widget and would love to see those changes made to the chat widget.
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Hi Ben,
Accessibility is a larger priority for all product teams in Zendesk now. In terms of improvements for the widget experience, we are focusing most of our efforts in the new integrated chat experience in the Web Widget: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002088268-Embed-personalized-omnichannel-support-with-the-Web-Widget-integrated-Chat-experience
Currently, we have no plans to make significant changes to the accessibility support in the Chat standalone widget in 2019.
Thanks,
Ramin
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We are also looking to make our website fully ADA compliant and unfortunately the last remaining piece is that the support web widget does not meet the standard. Please reconsider the priority of these features so we will not need to build our own widget using the Web SDK in order to make our site ADA compliant.
Thank you,
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