[BlindRUG] Help us test User! 2021 COnference chat

[Liz Hare]

Hi all,

I've been volunteering with the UseR! 2021 organizing committee on the accessibility of this summer's conference.

One important feature of online conferences has been the ability to ask questions and have conversations with presenters and other participants, but these interfaces have been really inaccessible. Because of this and because the R community values open-source projects (among other reasons), we've chosen a web frontend for IRC messaging, theLounge (https://thelounge.chat).

This frontend isn't perfectly accessible, but it's possible to read the chats and select and follow links. The developers are very interested in working on this with us (the GitHub for this project is https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge).

We'd like to set up an instance of the chat server specifically for testing by screen reader users, so I'm hoping to find some people here who would be willing to check it out and provide feedback and suggestions for accessibility. It would also be great to find someone who has experience making javascript apps more accessible,

Please get in touch if you'd be interested in giving this a try.

Liz
lizhare at doggenetics.com