Accessibility Glossary

Animations can be turned off

At Glean we like to add small animations which provide feedback and delight to simple actions. However animation can cause dizziness, nausea and headaches for people with vestibular disorders. All animations in Glean can be disabled by a setting either in your web browser or device settings.

Buttons have accessible names

Like many web apps, buttons in Glean are often just an icon with no text. However all buttons have an accessible name which allows assistive technology to understand what the button does.

Colour contrast

At Glean we use colour contrast checkers to make sure the majority of colours on our pages have a contrast of at least 4.5:1 against the background colour. This is important for people with vision impairment, but also for all of us! You should be able to use Glean outside on a sunny day and still be able to see text and buttons.

Focus outline is visible

A focus outline shows where the keyboard focus is for people who do not use a mouse. The web browser gives us this feature for free, however many applications and websites feel this focus outline looks bad and so remove it. At Glean we make sure it is always shown.

Glean also supports customising the colour of the focus outline on certain platforms such as macOS. This allows you to choose a colour that you like, or improve the visibility of it.

Headings

Headings are incredibly important for assistive technology like screen readers to be able to navigate and move around the page. All panels, toolbars and pop ups in Glean start with a heading and this allows people using a screen reader to immediately jump to any part of the page without having to manually navigate to it.

Most of the time however, these headings are visually hidden in panels and toolbars as the purpose of the section is made clear through clean design. Even when they are visually hidden, they still work with assistive technology.

Screen reader status updates

When regions of the page are changed or the user has performed an action then an announcement will be made via screen reader to provide confirmation and feedback. This is useful for people with vision impairment as they may not otherwise be able to see what has changed.

Shortcuts can be disabled

Glean uses many keyboard shortcuts to make taking notes fast and effective, these are listed on our help website. However shortcuts can interfere with assistive technology like screen readers which also use lots of keyboard shortcuts. As a result it is important that you can at least switch them off to prevent conflicts. You can disable shortcuts in the preferences panel.

Skip links

Skip links are visually hidden links which allow a person who only uses the keyboard to jump to the next section of a page. People who only use the keyboard will use the TAB key to move around the page, however if there is lots of content then they will need to press it many times.

Skip links will show themselves when tab is pressed at the start of a section and when enter is pressed on them then the keyboard focus will jump over the entire section to the beginning of the next section. This allows a keyboard user to quickly navigate the page.