A quick guide to Slack’s accessibility settings (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Did you know that Slack comes with lots of accessibility features? Check this out. Welcome back to Slack School. My name is Mike Reynolds. I'm your host. I'm part of the Slack team here at Salesforce. And today we're going to talk about some of Slack's accessibility settings. There are all sorts of things that Slack does to help you out depending on what you need. And we're going to take a look at a few of the different ones that I use or have used. Let's get after it. But before we start, make sure you're doing this along with me in the Slack community workspace. You can join for free, ask questions if you have any in the Slack School channel, or try out the builds that we do. Let's go. All of Slack's accessibility settings can be done right in our preferences menu. So let's hop in there and take a look. I get to preferences by going up here to the name of the workspace. I can drag this out so we can see this is the Slack community workspace where you should be. We'll click here and go to preferences. We're going to start with appearance. When we're in our appearance, there's several different settings that could help us out. Now, these are all going to be visual settings that affect all of Slack. The first one, one of my favorites, near and dear to my heart, is the open dyslexic font. This might be a little jarring to your eye, but to me, it's pretty amazing. As a dyslexic person, P, B, Q, and D all look the same to me. They're the same letter, they're just kind of arranged differently because in the way that I think in my brain, everything is three-dimensional all the time. So if you spin that around, it's all the same thing. This font changes the shape of each letter in a unique way, and so they're not visually all identical. And that's really important if you have a brain that is like mine. I'm going to flip this back because I know it's kind of jarring for a lot of people to see that font, but I love it. We can also set your overall color mode, right? So this is whether you're light themed or dark theme. We know you developers, you all love dark mode because the bugs are attracted to the light. I understand if you want to leave it that way. I have a tendency to leave it on light mode because I do a lot of presenting and people think it's easier to see in light mode. But set it however the way you like. We also have a couple of vision-assistive themes that come right out of the box. I like this Tritanopia theme. And really what these two themes do is they just give you a sharp contrast that's a bit easier if you don't see all of the colors the same way that everybody else does. I can go over here now to the accessibility menu. When I do this, it's going to say, hey, you've changed something. Do you want to keep those or discard? In this case, I'll go ahead and save them. And we'll jump back over to the accessibility. I'm going to skip the simplified layout for now. We'll circle back to it. Oh, I'm sorry. I said circle back. Sorry. It's recorded now. There's no way to fix it. So the first thing that we can do, we can look at zooming. I can always come into my preferences menu and change the zoom, but we also have a keyboard shortcut for it. So on a Mac, it is the command button and then plus and minus. I'll show you that now. You can do this anywhere in Slack. It very easily changed the font size, no matter where you are. That's always available. Then we also have a few settings around alt text, whether or not you want to be reminded we support alt text. So when you add an image, you have that option of adding the alt text at that time. We can turn off a couple of other things. One of my favorites here, automatically play animations in Slack. If you are an easily distracted person, by turning this off, if somebody posts a GIF or they use an emoji that is an animated emoji, those things will not be animated by default. You will have to click on them to turn that setting on. If you have a hard time focusing, like I do, that's a great one to turn off in your main workspace where you're trying to get work done. We also have a load of keyboard shortcuts that can really help smooth things out, so you don't necessarily have to navigate your mouse around the screen to try to find something. Of course, there's several different settings on the screen reader, and one that is very important is the order in which certain elements are read to you. It's very easy to change that. We can literally drag them and drop them around, or you can use the arrows to move items up or down when you're using your screen reader. That's pretty handy. One of the favorite features though, if we go up to the top, we have the simplified layout mode. So I'll go ahead and show everybody what that looks like. Simplified layout is the exact same Slack, but in a simplified layout. This is going to make your life easier when you're navigating Slack. Here I can choose more and go direct to my home screen, and this is showing me the left navigation bar. I can go down, choose a channel, and now I'm inside the channel. I have a breadcrumb trail at the top, so if I need to navigate back, that is fairly easy to do. Maybe I want to jump into Slack, or maybe I want to jump in to say hello to Slack bot. That's easy to do. Jump back to home very easily, or all the way back to the top. I can still get into the admin menu in this view, or any other aspect of Slack. Well there you have it. Accessibility in Slack has always been important, and it continues to be important for us. You can actually check out our accessibility change log right here. Jump into the Slack community workspace at slackcommunity.com and try out some of these settings yourself. If you're a Slack admin, it's really important that you know how to support all of your users. Slack's giving you the tools, but you're going to have to help people set them up and make sure that everybody knows what's available. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and we'll see you next time. Hey, good job today. I was not trying to pet you, I was trying to show the accessibility change log. You don't care.