Accessibility Issues

Wrike is a great tool for teams if everyone is fully capable of using a mouse. My organisation consists of many blind or visually impaired employees that have difficulty navigating Wrike. It is surprising to see how many errors or alerts come up when Wrike is scanned for accessibility. 

http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://www.wrike.com/

Is the Wrike Dev team looking into addressing accessibility issues? Government agencies require 508 compliance to use.

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I can't link to the scan of my workspace but there are fewer issues there. It would be great to get these addressed.

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Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Joseph, thank you for your post. Acquiring 508 compliance isn't on our current roadmap. That said, I understand how important accessibility is (both for you and your team and for others), and I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties you have encountered while navigating the Workspace.  I wanted to thank you for taking the time to provide this information and share your insight about Workspace accessibility.

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Not planning to do business with any federal agencies or contractors or subcontractors then eh? Starting in March 2018 this is a required component for any/all businesses that do any federal work and will apply to the tools these companies use as well. The 508 refresh was published January 2017 and becomes law 2018. 

You really plan to NOT include any attempt to reach 30% of the population who uses assistive technology as your business model?

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Stephanie Westbrook

Hi @Samantha and @Joseph we've been discussing this more internally this week (and your comments helped fuel those discussions). The team understands how important accessibility is (both for individual users and for anyone who would need Wrike to meet accessibility standards because of 508 compliance) and the team is going to start filling out a VPAT assessment.

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Stephanie Westbrook

Hi everyone, I know this isn't 508 compliance, but we've taken the first step towards assessing where we are and completed a VPAT assessment. It is confidential so we can't post it publically but we are happy to email it to interested individuals. If you would like us to send it to you, just leave a comment letting us know.

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Adding our voice to this -- we're excited by the possibilities of Wrike but we'll have to limit its use to just a couple of employees until it's made accessible.  We're a California state university but we are also bound by Section 508.

We'll follow up with our account representative for the VPAT.

Thank you,

Kate Sharron

Program Manager, Universal Design Center

California State University, Northridge

 

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Hi Stephanie,

I would be interested in seeing the VPAT assessment. I work with a digital agency who specialise in accessibility and we are looking for a project management tool to use internally for our team. As per the comments above a key requirement for us is a tool that meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (this is the international standard, Section 508 is based on this standard). 

I would note that WCAG is a mandatory requirement for digital services in Australia and many other countries. Although 508 is a Government requirement in the USA you might want to take note of the growing list of legal cases occurring against companies in the USA.

Thank you,

Stewart Hay

Managing Director, Intopia

 

 

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Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Stewart, I'd be happy to send it to you! You'll be getting an email from me shortly. Please let me know if you have any questions!

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I'd like to see the VPAT as well. 

VPATS declare how accessible a product is, not a company. https://www.section508.gov/content/sell/vpat

http://www.lflegal.com/2017/08/ny-web-cases/

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Stephanie Westbrook

Hi Samantha, I'll send an email shortly with the document attached! 

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Hi There, Although UK based we also have a large number of staff who would require it to be accessible.  I would be interested in seeing the VPAT and hear more about how your organisation intends to meet this growing need for products to be available to all.

Many thanks,

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Hi,

I work at the American Printing House for the Blind and we started working with a similar software but aren't as happy with it. It is accessible, but a bit clunky. We stopped by Wrike's booth at the CreativePro Week conference last week and were interested to learn more, BUT it has to be accessible in order for us to consider. I notice the comments above ended last year, so just wondering if any progress has been made to this software to be 508 compliant.

Thank you,

Stephanie

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Hi,

Is Wrike 508 compliant now?

Thanks

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Just added my money's worth - we have a visually impaired person working with us, and whilst the majority have adopted Wrike fairly well, he now shy's away from using it as often. Any update on this?

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Love using Wrike internally for our department. I just chatted with a very helpful Wrike rep, and found out that Wrike is not yet 508 compliant. This limits our ability to use it (specifically forms) outside of our department. 

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Just finding out about the accessibility limitations of Wrike because of a new staff person who is having a very frustrating time navigating it using a well know computer screen reader for the visually-impaired. This is pretty disappointing, but I hope Wrike decision makers will soon realize the value of making their platform accessible. My group has been using Wrike for several years, and for the most part, it's been great. I love it and I actually pushed for adoption of it with my staff. Even so, I'll be looking out for alternatives that have more of the population in mind when they consider design, functionality and compatibility.

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Stephen

@All, our Product Team is looking to address the accessibility issues raised here. Thanks to the OP for raising this topic and everyone else for commenting.
 
In an effort to better understand accessibility needs, our Product Team would like your input regarding accessibility and VPAT and WCAG certification. A survey will be distributed to a wide range of people using Wrike, and I wanted to share it with you too as it's very relevant to everyone on this thread.
 
If you could please take a few minutes to submit your answers to these survey questions it would very helpful.
 
Thank you in advance!
 
Any questions, I'm happy to discuss.
 
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Hi Stephen,

Although it is commendable to place a survey out to your users, might I suggest you take some time to talk with a digital accessibility specialist first?

For example VPAT is only a requirement in the USA and only for government agencies as part of Section 508 procurement. In the USA companies are being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act for not having accessible online services. Recent cases are suggesting that meeting the minimum requirement of WCAG 2.0 AA is not always good enough. FYI the amount of legal cases has been growing quite rapidly over the last 2 years, it is now in the thousands per year.

Internationally it is generally a requirement that you meet WCAG 2.0 AA (note that version 2.1 was released in June 2018). In Europe they have just updated their ICT Accessibility procurement standard, EN301 549, to now require this to be WCAG 2.1 AA. The Australian standard, AU EN 301 549,  is based on the European one but is still only referencing WCAG 2.0 AA.

I think you also need to be aware that these standards cover all disabilities including vision, hearing, physical and cognitive.

If you get some help you are going to save a lot of time and effort. This will help you get to a more accessible and inclusive Wrike quicker. 

My advice is to:

  1. Have an accessibility expert audit Wrike and get a detailed report about what WCAG 2.1 A and AA success criteria you are not meeting and advice on how to fix it.
  2. Work with an accessibility expert to help your designers, developers, testers and product owners to know what they should be doing and helping with any of the design and technical approaches you need to follow to be accessible. Make sure they are practical because you are most likely not going to be in a position to fix all issues immediately. But you do need to start.
  3. Once you have most of the obvious issues fixed then conduct some usability testing with people with disabilities to make sure that Wrike isn't just accessible but also usable.

My team at Intopia are digital accessibility specialists, members of the W3C and can definitely help if you want it. I am not saying this just as a sales pitch, I am also happy to direct you to others in the industry who can equally help you. I am more interested in seeing you make Wrike accessible and do this in the most cost effective way possible. Despite the legal risk it actually is good business to have an accessible and inclusive system and I am happy to provide you some of the business research to support this. 

Good luck!

Stewart

 

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Stephen

Hi Stewart, thanks so much for your insight and knowledge here on this topic. Your feedback here has been passed to the relevant team for review.
 
Currently, the team are taking multiple approaches to gather all required information regarding accessibility; this survey is one communication approach and I wanted to share it here with everyone commenting on this thread. 
 
I also appreciate your kind offer to speak to our team about this. I've passed this information on to the relevant Product Team and if this becomes a need on their side, we'll be sure to reach out to you.
 
Thanks again!
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Your social media responders have no idea what accessibility is. They said, in writing, that accessibility can mean a number of things.

So for anyone reading, accessibility is not part of the Wrike landscape.

We offered advice in 2017 and 2018. Your "Tier 2 Support Team" said this today:

Wrike is not yet compliant with section 508. We are moving in that direction but the process is not quick. Our engineers estimated Wrike accessibility issues and work on fixing them. 

I'm sorry that I cannot share any precise details with you at this point. Once we have an official update about this matter it will be posted on our Community.

Do not hesitate to let me know if you come up with any further questions about Wrike and have a great day!

Best regards,

Tatyana K
Tier 2 support team

 

For anyone keeping score - two years is more than enough time to remediate code, implement new code and development practices, and incorporate WCAG standards.

ETA: If someone has sold you that WCAG offers certification for website compliance, they likely also have a bridge to sell you.  

 

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Your survey:

What are your accessability requirements? -- accessibility is not spelled with an A in the middle.
 
This is a legal requirement of certification availability.(there is no certification from WCAG - you either meet the WCAG standards or you do not)
This is a legal requirement of certification on particular level of compliance.(there is no certification from WCAG - you either meet the WCAG standards or you do not)
We don't have strict formal requirements, but we require certification to consider Wrike compliant to our employees' needs.(OMG there is no certification)
 
Are there particular requirements from your employees? - hey what do you know, all of these are the BASICS for WCAG standards, they aren't a la carte offerings.
Contrast, color, interface-size improvements.
Keyboard navigation.
Page semantic for screen readers or other assistive technology.
General simplification of interfaces. Separate simplified app for particular part of Wrike.
 
Do you need a particular level of WCAG and VPAT compliance? VPATs don't have this. WCAG has two sets of standards, 2.0 and 2.1. And US, Canadian, Australian, and EU law requires WCAG 2.0 AA - even if you are not a federal agency. Since the 508 Refresh in January 2018.
A
AA
AAA
Other:
 
Is full accessibility/compliance a requirement? - Do you know what "full accessibility/compliance" means? What are you assigning to this qualifier? 
In the eyes of the law, meeting WCAG 2.0 AA is THE LAW, so partial is how much legal risk are you willing to take along with how much of your workforce are you willing to block from being able to do their job.
Yes, we need full compliance.
No, partial implementation is fine. We can work with it.
 
When do you need it?
We already require it. -- do you live and work and do business in the top 45 industrialized countries in the world? It's already law.
We need it next year.
Other:
 
If you have employees with disabilities, what kind of tasks/work do they do and what part of work/project management processes they are involved into? - This is really how you want to address accessibility? By segmenting employees? SMH good thing you're not being reviewed by legal eh?
It doesn't matter what their roles or tasks are. The responsibility of the employer is to ensure that any product or service does not present a barrier to doing their job. And the US federal law mandated all ICT be accessible in 2018. Period.
 
They work on particular tasks.
They work on particular tasks, lists of tasks, projects. They can assign tasks to other people.
They're in project planning management.
 
How important is accessibility for mobile apps?   - How important is use of a mobile phone vs. a landline in making a telephone call? 
Really? You don't get to legally pick and choose where you implement accessibility. SMH.
 
Top priority
Equal requirements for all Wrike interfaces
Low priority
Other:
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And Stephen -- your survey, is totally inaccessible. That's like the cherry on top.

 

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Stephen

Hi Samatha, thank you for your input here, I have passed this feedback to the relevant team.

I understand you've been in contact with our team about this via other channles, so I just want to keep you and everyone else here updated on what's happening right now.

First of all, thank you all for your feedback and input on this topic. In 2018, the team spent time understanding the issues and collecting initial data on accessibility. This year, there are plans to improve Wrike accessibility and this work is already in motion.

This is a big and important effort for our team, which is of high priority. We really appreciate the feedback you have provided us and the comments published here are reviewed by the product team. This information is hugely valuable during this investigation and development process.

As soon as I have any updates or new information on I'll be sure to keep you updates here.

Again, thank you for your input.

 

 

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Can we get a VPAT please?

At our university we are conducting an accessibility assessment and I would like to review it.

Thank you,

G

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Any update on this? ADA is important to my company and we want to use a Wrike form externally, but we need to make sure it is compliant. More specifically, I can't see how screen readers can detect if there's an error on the form. Yes there's a tooltip that appears when a user hovers over an input field with an error, but my screen reader does not pick that up. I know that error messages need to have the role attribute set to "alert" for screen readers to pick it up. Am I missing something?

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Hi everyone! Sorry for the late reply here! I've checked with the Product team - they are working on accessibility this year and they'll continue this work in 2021 too. This is a fairly big project, that is why it's taking the team some considerable time. I will let you know once I have an update from the team.

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

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It is the end of 2021 now, and I am seriously, seriously disappointed in the lack of advancement made in this area. The website was more useable in the middle of the year than it is now... and it is nearly impossible for my screenreader and I to even locate where to make a comment about this issue still occurring.... I am curious which company needs to be sued for this to be taken seriously.... the one I am working for, that is using such terribly not accessible applications.... or this one for the creation of such... and then dragging their feet on the implementation... even just on the website side for a fix.... never-the-less the completely useless application built into the operating systems... By the way, as I am typing this, the form does not give my screenreader any way to know what I am typing... so I am typing completely in the dark. Ho9pefully this does not get removed or even barred from being displayed... given the trouble I had in making the comment. 

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Hi Janice Jeang, thank you so much for checking in here.
 
Apologies for the lack of update on this thread, but please be assured that we've been working on this in the background. In terms of making improvements to our accessibility, there are a number of updates I'd like to share.
 
At the moment, we're mainly focused on the main Wrike web application and improving accessibility there. We've been working on fixing underlying issues with our technology in the app which needed to be addressed before we could look to make other improvements and I'm happy to say that this work has been completed. We're therefore now focused on the core parts of the application and are working on improvements there as we speak, with some improvements due to be available by the end of this year. We are then going to proceed with other core parts of the application, and expect to see these improvements available in 2022.
 
This is a really important focus for us and we have a dedicated accessibility team who are fully focused on building accessibility into our design process and we are currently progressing towards WCAG 2.1 AA for web our application. As part of this work, we'll be looking at implementing screen readers support, keyboard navigation, color/contrast improvements as well as other improvements.
 
A point to note is that our desktop application has accessibility issues because of the desktop technology, so we would recommend using the Wrike web application for a better experience.
 
I'm sorry to hear it was difficult for you to make the comment here, we're aware that there are issues to be addressed on our site. For now, as outlined above, our main focus is on the Wrike web app, however, we have passed this feedback on to the team and will be sure to look at ways to address this as well.
 
We'll be sure to keep you posted on any updates we have as we keep working to improve our accessibility. If you have any additional questions, or if there's anything else I can help with please don't hesitate to ask.

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Learn about Wrike’s killer features and best practices with our Online Training Webinars

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Hi there,

So it looks like this thread has not had an update in the last 6 months. 

Is there any update? Rolling out the new Wrike interface without addressing accessibility seems like a massive mistake. Hopefully I am wrong :) 

I'd also like a copy of the VPAT please. Thank you!

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Hi Andy Lechlak, welcome to the Community! I apologize for the late reply here.

The team is currently working on some major updates to Wrike and they are also working on the accessibility for those new features. It's too early to share more, but we'll be announcing all updates here on the Community.

I've asked your Account Manager to contact you about the VPAT 👍

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

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