Accessibility Issues

For anyone new to this thread... and that includes Wrike staff (Lisa you might want to read back)

There have been promises in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and surprisingly nothing in 2021.

Each year promising that "they're working on it".

The platform itself is not accessible, if your new features are the only places where there's focus, that's a fool's errand. 

It's been five years and they've made no progress, because accessibility is not a priority to them. Every year promising it's a priority. 

Accessibility is either part of your SDLC or it's something you deem irrelevant.

Thank you Lisa for the reply.

I am super disappointed in reading the entire thread. Especially knowing they had a major overhaul in UI and didn't make accessibility a priority. 

That is the most obvious statement. 

Andy, Lisa had a similar response in 2020.

Hello everyone, my name is Mikhail and I’m the director of engineering at Wrike. Please let me shed some light on how we work on Wrike’s accessibility. 

Accessibility is an important topic for us at Wrike engineering teams. We have dedicated resources aimed at making Wrike more accessible and compliant. This work has two main themes:

1. Gradual improvement of accessibility in available product features and use cases
2. Improvement of underlying technology and processes to enable accessibility

I’d like to share a bit more detail about the past and upcoming product improvements that involve accessibility and our work related to them.  

Product improvements

Several years ago we formulated our approach to improve accessibility scope by scope starting from the most crucial, general, and most used scopes.

The first stage of this scope-by-scope improvement is Accessibility MVP (minimum viable product). It includes navigation and work with tasks in Wrike.

The New Wrike Experience, the homepage, and the top navigation have been part of this project. We also improved the folder tree, task view, and inbox. At the same time, I can confirm that there still are known issues in certain types of accessibility of those features that we aim to fix.

A major missing piece of our Accessibility MVP is Table View and Task list, more specifically, the ability to select a task and open it. This is our focus this year besides all the fixes in other parts of Wrike.

We are currently working on a new Table View and accessibility is the part of initial design and further development. Because accessibility is still the property of interfaces and needs to be coded, it does take us a considerable amount of time and resources.

There are many other available views in the product and we are going to work on them in the next stage.

Enabling accessibility

Last year we completed our work on the accessibility of UI components. It enables the engineering team to provide a basic level of accessibility to new features and also it fixes the behavior of different interfaces of the product that use those components (buttons, fields, pickers, lists, etc.)

Unfortunately, it doesn’t fix everything because accessibility of particular views and use cases also depends on how those components are set up to work together to provide appropriate keyboard navigation, focus management, and support of assistive technologies. At the same time, it was an important step to enable UI accessibility.

Another important track is building accessibility into our product-engineering processes. We wanted it to be part of the initial design and now we have accessibility as a part of product design since last autumn.

This technological and processual enablement is targeting all new features to be made with WCAG AA accessibility.

I understand this overview of the things we’ve been working on and continue improving doesn’t cover all the concerns that you’ve shared here. We appreciate your feedback and although we understand we don’t have all the bases covered yet, we strive to provide you with more accessible solutions now and in the future. 

For more information, we can send you a copy of VPAT assessment individually upon request.

Thank you for your feedback here, please rest assured we receive and review it regularly.

Mikhail Levin Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Mikhail Levin Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Can you please send me a copy of the VPAT? We have a screenreader user who will be joining our staff and need to be able to work proactively to support this team member's ability to log their time, create and assign tasks to others, comment on tasks, upload files, navigate their own tasks, understand priority and timing, as well as time spent so far on any given subtask, parent task or project. 

I've asked your Account Manager to reach out to you about this Lara Ortiz 👍

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa, can you please help me obtain a copy of the VPAT, too?

Absolutely Kelly Winter, I've asked your Account team to provide it to you 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi, it's been 6 months since I've seen any updates. What improvements have been made in Accessibility?  Could you also send me your VPAT?

Any chance we will get an official accessibility update? The new interface is better, but the contrast does not work for vision impairment. 

Hello everyone! Mikhail here again. Thank you for sharing your feedback in this Community thread.

I’d like to share an update and our high-level plans for Accessibility for this year. 

As I’ve mentioned last time, our main goal has been to complete Wrike Accessibility MVP and the two missing pieces were focus trap in the task view description and new Table view.

We completed both of them and we now consider Accessibility MVP finished.

There is now a solution to avoid focus trap in the task view. It’s a button to skip description that is only visible when you use a keyboard or a screen reader. There is also a way around that to enter the editor and leave it by ‘Esc’ button. This also works the same in the new Work item view. 

In the new Table view, we implemented a tree-grid ARIA pattern and implemented a way to interact with cells, tasks and projects through context menu and keyboard shortcuts.

Now to our plans for 2023.

There are two main themes for our work with Accessibility this year:

1. Ensuring every new feature comes with Accessibility. Enforcing our processes and workflow. This is work in progress that includes: 

- Auditing everything that was done last year with issues filed and being fixed by product teams
- Monitoring and auditing all new features on the design stage
- Educating the engineering teams and Quality Assurance engineers, in particular, in applying Accessibility standards and test automation in Accessibility

2. Completing Accessibility for the core set of features that covers at least 80% of usage:

- We have two major development tracks this year that cover a large set of product views being rebuilt and polished. That includes features from MVP stage including the new Table view and many others - Board view, dashboards, work item view, etc.
- We will finally make our underlying technology ready for the next big step in color/contrast of the product. This year we are working to connect our design system with the already prepared standard WCAG AA color scheme with all UI elements and running a big project related to color themes to ensure this connection. At the same time, we intensify testing in this field because we have a clear mechanism in our system where to fix those issues systematically.

Our Accessibility plans are closely connected with product plans and I’m excited by how many features we are working on this year. This comes with high awareness of our design, product, and engineering teams of how important Accessibility is. Together we acquired expertise and underlying technology, and I'm looking forward to this year's progress.

Mikhail Levin Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Mikhail Levin Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi Mikhail - first I want to say thank you for the detailed information that you have provided above over the past year.  It would be helpful if all CSMs would share these updates with their customers.  This is the first time I am reading anything to this level of detail.  We review the VPAT reports each year and they all seem similar (word by word), with the exception to timelines being pushed.  Your updates above give us a more in-depth story on the steps your team is taking to make improvements.  I for one appreciate detailed updates.  I will be sharing this with our ISO.

Thanks again and if you have any new updates since May, we would love to hear about them!

I am looking for an update on the status of Wrike's accessibility. 

Hi Abigale Stangl, welcome to the Community 👋 Thank you for reaching out!

We don't currently have an update so the above update from Mikhail posted in May is the actual one. Please let me know if you have any specific questions about it! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Good afternoon, 

I would like to request a copy of the latest VPAT regarding accessibility in Wrike.

Thank you,

Stacy

Hi! Thank you for all the information regarding Wrike's accessibility policy...I was looking through Wrike's and Citrix's pages for any updates on accessibility for 2024/2025. 

Additionally, please send me a copy of the latest VPAT!

Best,

Katrina

Hi folks! @Stacy Gibson-Grandfield I asked your account owner to assist you with that, and I can see they have 👍

Katrina Huang Our team is currently working on providing it to you 🙌 Welcome to the Community! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Could I please have a copy of the latest VPAT?

Hey Marcelle Gornitsky, I've raised this with our team and ask them to send it to you 👍 Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover