Miro Accessibility

Miro continues to advance accessibility, both from a compliance perspective and by focusing on the user experience for people with disabilities. 

Some exciting updates:

• The Command Palette in Miro is useful for accessing any command from anywhere on a Miro board. Pressing Control + K (Windows) or Cmd + K (macOS) brings up a list of commands, with a search field. Start typing to search through the list of commands, and use the arrow keys to explore the list. Pressing Enter will directly execute that command.  For example, to add a sticky note:

  1. Press Control + K (Windows) or Cmd + K (macOS)

  2. Type "Sticky"

  3. Press Enter

  4. Press Tab until you reach the desired sticky note

  5. Press Enter

  We conducted user research with 12 visually impaired assistive technology users, and for the following task: “Add a sticky note to the board, add text, and change the sticky note color to orange”. Utilizing the Command Palette, participants were able to complete the task with an average Accessibility Usability Scale (AUS) of 69.2%. With that in mind, we made several key improvements to the Command Palette:

  • Improved the user experience for assistive technology users

  • Added several overall assistive technology commands:

    • Announce board summary

  • Added several object commands:

    • Announce object details

    • Announce object content and type

    • Open connectors (to perceive connectors within diagrams)

• Providing access to a real-time collaborative spatial environment is one of the most exciting challenges (and opportunities) in the accessibility space. We are honored that our paper, "A Demonstration of Innovative Features for Inclusive Real-Time Collaboration," was accepted for publication at ASSETS24, one of the top academic conferences "highly respected in a discipline area".

• Miro made some exciting announcements around the future product direction, Innovation Workspace, including the integration of features like Miro Docs, Tables, Intelligent Widgets, and AI into Miro. While this provides us with a challenging opportunity, we are fully committed to ensuring that both existing and new Miro capabilities are accessible to everyone. We have invested time into both setting up efficient, lightweight accessibility evaluation processes, and also resolving issues detected through that process. 

• Miro is also committed to ensuring that our product and features comply with W3C WCAG 2.2 AA. As a result, we update our VPAT/ACR yearly. We have just kicked off the latest audit with our trusted external partner, LevelAccess.

• Finally, we continue to make a host of smaller but impactful technical accessibility improvements under the hood to improve the user experience, such as:

  • Reducing the reliance on live regions to make navigating a Miro board with assistive technologies more robust.

  • Improving support for keyboard and assistive technologies for the Miro Accessibility Checker.

  • Detecting and correcting over 270 accessibility issues before they were released to users.

As always, we welcome feedback and suggestions on Accessibility at Miro, so please do get in touch at [email protected].

The Miro Accessibility team has been busy the last few months, but we’re pleased to share some of our progress towards making Miro more accessible and inclusive.

• Accessibility Overview: With all the improvements and new features over the years, we’ve brought all these updates into one place so you can see what we’ve been doing. Check out our Overview of Miro Accessibility Help Center article to learn more.

• Accessibility Checker: We’re thrilled to announce the release of the Accessibility Checker. This feature scans a variety of content on Miro boards, identifying areas that may not meet accessibility standards. The checks include:

  • Text color contrast

  • Non-text color contrast

  • Image descriptions

  • Container titles

  Once the checker has done its job, actionable insights are shared, improving user content. For instance, select similar text color contrast issues while changing text color in just a couple of clicks.

  

  Watch our Accessibility Checker video on Google Drive to experience the tool in action. For more information on the Accessibility Checker, head over to our Miro Accessibility Checker Help Center article.

• Intelligent Canvas: We’ve been working to support the release of Intelligent Canvas, the next generation of Miro. And ensure that these exciting new innovations are built in the most accessible and inclusive way. In the upcoming months stay tuned for further updates!

• Miro accessibility in the field: Dave Ross, Phil Strain, and Peter Gould are running an interactive session at Agile2024 in Dallas, USA, and Manchester, UK. Addressing accessibility and inclusivity, they’ll explore how digital innovation tools, like Miro, can empower teams to run more accessible agile rituals. 

We love hearing your thoughts and feedback on the Miro accessibility experience. If you’d like to share, you can reach us at [email protected].

We are excited to announce four accessibility updates to make Miro an even more accessible and inclusive experience.

• Miro Assist for image alt text suggestions: Miro provides users with a way to add alt text for images. However, it’s not always easy to know what to put as an image description. If Miro Assist is enabled, Miro now provides suggestions for supported images around what the image description should be. Note that you still have full control over whether or not a suggestion is added to the board.

  

• Table of contents /overview for assistive technologies: Miro boards can often contain hundreds of objects. One of the ways to make a board more accessible is to place objects in frames. This provides a hierarchical structure that can be navigated with assistive technologies. With this update, we take this one step further by providing a Table of Contents or overview of a Miro board. This overview can be navigated using your built-in commands for assistive technology. For more details, check out our How to access Miro boards with Accessibility Technologies Help Center article.

• Support for speech recognition: Voice recognition tools are built-in to macOS (VoiceOver) and Microsoft Windows (Voice Access). With this update, it is now possible to access most functionality on Miro using voice alone. 

• Diagramming enhancements for accessibility: Diagrams are often complex and consist of an object, e.g. a shape, that is connected to multiple other objects via connector lines. We have now unlocked keyboard and assistive technology support for diagrams by providing a way to navigate through connector lines. This is the first step in making it possible to both create and navigate diagrams by using assistive technologies.

  

We love hearing your feedback about the accessibility experience on Miro. Feel free to send any thoughts to [email protected].

Welcome to our first accessibility update of 2024!

Our Accessibility Team has been busy over the past three months. We’re very excited to share some things we’re doing to make Miro a more accessible and inclusive innovation experience:

Accessible context menu: We know how important having good keyboard navigation is. Now you can use keyboard shortcuts to move focus from an object to the floating context menu, change the object’s properties, and move focus back to the object again. If you want more info about available keyboard shortcuts, check out our Keyboard Navigation article in the Help Center.

Accessibility Conformance Report: Our partner, Level Access, concluded their external accessibility audit of Miro. You’ll see that in our most recent Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), we got “Supports” or “Partially supports” for every success criteria. Behind the scenes, our teams are continuing to work to resolve the reported issues.

We’ve also been busy advocating for accessibility by writing blog posts and speaking at conferences. Our Head of Accessibility, Phil Strain, wrote about How AI Will Transform Digital Accessibility in CIO Dive. Our Senior Software Engineer, Adrián Bolonio Cuesta, ran a workshop about web accessibility at an external bootcamp. Our QA Engineer, Peter Gould, spoke about Miro’s accessibility journey at the Ctrl Alt Del Summit.

But we’re not finished. We also have a few exciting features coming soon, like Miro Assist suggestions for image alt text. Stay tuned for updates over the next few months!

We love hearing your feedback about the accessibility experience on Miro. Feel free to send any thoughts to [email protected].

Welcome back to our series of Miro accessibility updates and improvements. For the first part of the year, we’ve shared updates every month. After this update, which covers two months, we plan to post an update every three months. Let’s dive in!

Deprecated screen reader mode: Over the past years we’ve featured a separate screen reader mode, which you could navigate to by Tab. As we improved Miro’s native accessibility, this mode became less necessary and useful—so much that by October, we deprecated it for a more seamless Miro experience for everyone.

Keyboard navigation: We rolled out small improvements for focus management. We also added a keyboard shortcut to copy links to board objects, providing a label with the specific key combination, which is one of many similar keyboard accessibility improvements:

Miro accessibility audit: We’ve been working on resolving accessibility issues reported by our partner, Level Access. This audit is in the process of being concluded, so we will soon share an updated Miro accessibility conformance report (ACR, sometimes referred to by its template, a “VPAT”).

Miro accessibility in the field: Our Head of Accessibility, Phil Strain, wrote about accessibility and innovation at CIO Dive, in How accessibility drives innovation.

Accessibility features: As previously mentioned, we’ve developed and have been testing two new accessibility features. One feature makes use of Miro Assist to generate image alt text. The other allows users to test Miro board accessibility. Both features enable everyone to make boards more accessible.

Apart from this, we’ve also invested into the stability and observability of accessibility-related features. This is to make sure that none of what we do to improve the Miro experience inadvertently degrades.

If you have questions or comments, please contact us at any time at [email protected]!

As we continually strive to improve the accessibility of Miro, we’ve made progress on a number of accessibility-related priorities in September:

Alternative methods for accessing and interacting with Miro boards: As part of our research, the Miro Accessibility team has been working on making canvas content and collaboration more robust across a number of various assistive technologies and devices. This work has been technically more demanding given that there are fewer standards for canvas content than for normal web content. Our work on this has progressed well, and we hope to share additional options to access and interact on Miro soon.

AI-assisted accessibility: We’ve mentioned in the past how we’re “testing AI support for fallback contents” (July). These tests proved to be promising, so we're working on rolling out a new feature that will help Miro users create more accessible board content themselves.

Accessible board content: We’re also testing a new feature that will assist creators in producing accessible Miro boards, for example by checking color contrast and other attributes important for inclusivity.

Accessibility audit: Miro teams have made significant progress on resolving the reported issues, getting us closer to updating our accessibility conformance report (ACR, sometimes referred to as VPAT).

Accessibility improvements: We’ve made a range of minor improvements including:

• access to more widget information through a keyboard shortcut

• improved keyboard shortcut support for Windows

• information on the color of a Sticky Note

• bug fixes for the board background color feature

Customer collaboration: With other Mironeers, our Head of Accessibility, Phil Strain, guided a customer workshop around inclusive workplace culture.

We’ve also been introducing some new internal programs and fora, to promote accessibility and to provide more effective support to other Miro teams. (Last April we shared our approach to accessibility at Miro at AxeCon, and since then we have made significant iterations on the approach which we will be excited to share in an upcoming update.)

We’re always open to feedback, so please contact us at any time at [email protected]!

The Accessibility team have had another busy month working towards our goal of making Miro a more accessible and inclusive experience for everyone.

We are thrilled to share some of the improvements we’ve made in August 2023:

Board summary: We introduced a board summary feature to give screen reader users a better understanding of the contents of a Miro board. When activated, the number and types of objects on the board are announced.

Assistive technologies: We added screen reader support for even more objects, including user story mapping, Kanban, mockup, and Rally cards. We also added information about sticky note colors to assistive technology announcements.

Keyboard navigation: We introduced more keyboard shortcuts to make navigating large Miro boards even easier. You can now jump straight to the first or last widget on a board. We also introduced a keyboard shortcut to add new comments while an object is selected. For more details about available keyboard shortcuts, please see our Keyboard Navigation article in the Help Center.

Our own Stefano Baldan also shared more about our approach to keyboard accessibility: See Miro accessibility: Introducing keyboard navigation for board objects on the Miro Engineering blog!

In the background, we have also been working on some smaller accessibility improvements, as well as building the foundations for some exciting accessibility features coming in the near future. Stay tuned for further details in the coming months!

We’re always happy to hear your feedback, so please contact us at any time at [email protected].

July was another notable month for Miro accessibility — check out the accessibility updates we announced on the Miro blog! Here’s a quick review:

Alt text: After images were unlocked to be navigable by keyboard, we made it possible to add alt text to board images.

Assistive technologies: To make their content available to users of assistive technologies, we provided screen reader information for a number of additional objects. In July, these included documents, cards, shapes, curves, stencils, previews, program boards, code, and embeds.

Extended keyboard navigation: Comments, emoji, and tags are now keyboard-accessible as well.

Colors: Following a gradual rollout, everyone now benefits from text labels for color values, as well as from improved contrast when it comes to color selection itself.

AI-supported alternative content experiment: We’re testing AI support for fallback contents. The tests are promising — stay tuned for further details and plans!

GAAD talk at Futurice: Our lead designer, Kai Katonina, gave a talk about breaking barriers at work at Futurice. (Unfortunately, the talk page was removed, and the event was not recorded.)

This has been complemented by other, smaller accessibility fixes and improvements. It’s all part of our ongoing work to improve the Miro experience for everyone.

As always, if you have feedback or suggestions, please contact us at any time at [email protected]! We’d love to hear from you.

June was a great month for Miro users as we’ve unlocked canvas keyboard navigation, paving the way to make more and more objects accessible to users of assistive technology:

Keyboard navigation: After successful refining and testing, we rolled out canvas keyboard navigation to all users. The update allows users to navigate Miro boards linearly, spatially, and hierarchically—check out our documentation on shortcuts and hotkeys for details.

Assistive technologies: The recent keyboard navigation update allows board objects to be more perceivable and operable for users. In June, we integrated images, tables, text, emoji, and line objects to allow screen reader users to access information about these objects when navigating to them.

Board background colors: We released the option to change the background color of boards. While based on a popular request to suit branding and design preferences, the feature can be used to design dark boards that may be easier to read and can reduce eye strain.

In addition to these updates, Miro’s Head of Accessibility, Phil Strain, published an article about workplace accessibility in InformationWeek: How to Improve Workplace Accessibility With Assistive Tech.

(We are trying different formats to share what we are doing to improve the Miro experience for everyone. For feedback and suggestions, contact us at any time at [email protected].)

Toolbars: In May, we released an update to all users improving the accessibility of Miro's toolbars. The update makes navigating the toolbars easier with both keyboard and screen readers.

Keyboard navigation: The internal test of keyboard navigation for board widgets is in its final stages. Our engineering team is fixing a couple of issues found during the testing phase before proceeding to a public release. As mentioned in the previous update, this improvement will make it possible to navigate through all board objects in three different ways: one after another in natural reading order; following a given direction (left, right, up, or down) in the 2D space; and entering or exiting container objects such as frames, card boards, or selection groups.

Assistive technologies: We are making more board objects perceivable and operable for users of assistive technologies, integrating the respective technical solution with more and more widgets. Screen readers can now read the information contained within sticky notes and frames. We are also making the navigation context more perceivable when accessing board objects with the keyboard by communicating the position of the current selection in the list of selectable objects, the eventual presence of a container object (e.g., a frame), and the available keyboard shortcuts to navigate the board from the current position.

Both of these updates will significantly improve the Miro experience for keyboard and screen reader users. As these improvements are relatively large and complex, we are taking the time to test them thoroughly.

Audit: As mentioned in April, we conducted a large, third-party accessibility audit. Work is in progress to resolve the issues that were identified. A significant number of them were already resolved in May. While several Miro teams are resolving additional issues, we are working with our audit partner to verify the progress.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day: Along with our accessibility- and inclusion-minded peers, we celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 18. We hosted an internal event to draw attention both to accessibility in general and to the occasion. We are exploring additional ways to share what we are doing to improve the Miro experience for everyone. For feedback and suggestions, contact us at any time at [email protected].

In April, we made several accessibility-related improvements.

The biggest one includes improving keyboard navigation of board widgets, making it possible to navigate through all board objects in three different ways: one after another in natural reading order, following a given direction (left, right, up, or down) in the 2D space, and entering or exiting container objects such as frames, card boards, or selection groups. We’re currently testing the improvements internally, and expect to release them in the next few weeks.

With the respective technical solution in place, we’re also making more board objects perceivable and operable for users of assistive technologies. We’re integrating the solution with more and more components, i.e., widgets. Also in the next few weeks, this will increasingly improve the screen reader experience.

We’re currently still in the testing phase of an ongoing update improving the accessibility of selecting and changing colors, and are preparing it for full release. The same holds for allowing users to change the background color of boards. (We’ll update here, in our changelog, or on our blog.)

We received the results of our accessibility audit, which showed great improvements compared to last year’s audit. We’re currently reviewing the issues identified, and are preparing and planning the next steps. As mentioned previously, we’ll use the audit and the respective improvements to update our accessibility conformance report (ACR).

Apart from fixes and improvements too small to go into detail here, we’ve also shipped an update to make Miro toolbars more accessible. This update is in the process of being rolled out to everyone within the next few weeks.

Finally, the Accessibility team’s Stefano Baldan shared his Miro story, as well as our ideas about the sonification of boards in a post on the Miro Engineering blog: Audio Accessibility in Miro: A Hackathon Story in 3 Acts.

We’re actively exploring additional and alternative ways to share what we’re doing to improve the Miro experience for everyone. For feedback and suggestions, contact us at any time at [email protected].

As mentioned in our last update, our current product priorities include:

• up-leveling keyboard navigation of board widgets,

• enabling notifications on board interactions for users of assistive technologies, and

• providing a better experience selecting and changing colors.

We have rolled out behind-the-scenes updates around keyboard navigation and board notifications, which we are integrating with widgets. For a more accessible experience selecting and changing colors, we’re testing the respective update and are preparing it for full release.

Also related to colors, we released a feature, currently available to users on free plans, that allows them to change a board’s background color. We’re fine-tuning and testing this feature before deciding on the next steps for roll-out.

We’ve started a new third-party audit to validate our current status when it comes to accessibility, with audit results expected in April. We’ll then work on addressing issues, and update our accessibility conformance report (ACR).

Miro’s Accessibility team’s Phil Strain (Head of Accessibility) and Stefano Baldan gave a talk at axe-con on March 15th. To learn more about our thinking around accessibility, you can access a recording and transcript of their presentation: Our approach to accessibility at Miro.

In March, we also released an e-book about inclusion, detailing how to make it easier to engage with people with disabilities or access needs. Get your own copy of 10 Principles for Inclusive Collaboration (PDF).

We’re actively exploring additional and alternative ways to share what we’re doing to improve the Miro experience for everyone. For feedback and suggestions, please reach out to us at [email protected].

This update marks the start of a series that provides insight into the work of Miro’s Accessibility team, a group of accessibility specialists spanning Product, Design, and Engineering.

Our current user-facing priorities include

• improved keyboard navigation of board widgets,

• notifications on board interactions for users of assistive technologies, and

• a better experience selecting and changing colors.

Behind the scenes, we’re working on improvements to our testing infrastructure and processes, to make it easier for our teams to detect and fix accessibility problems.

We’re on track to making these improvements available in March or April, respectively. We will inform you about progress here or on other Miro channels, like in our changelog or on our blog.

We’ve also been fixing a number of smaller accessibility issues, and made other improvements. These include but are not limited to:

• general improvements for keyboard navigation

• adding missing media alternatives (like alt text)

• improving isolated issues with color contrast

• fixing an issue around widget cloning

• fixing an issue around reduced motion

Lastly, we’re preparing a comprehensive audit so as to validate our progress with respect to accessibility, and to provide an updated accessibility conformance report (ACR).

We’re going to explore additional and alternative ways to share more of what we’re doing to improve the Miro experience for everyone. For feedback and suggestions, please email us at [email protected].

Miro partnered with Level Access to audit our product and issue an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) based on Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) that determines how compliant Miro is with standards for IT products accessibility. ACR will be regularly revised and updated to capture all accessibility updates being worked on by the Miro product team. 

The purpose of the ACR is to help Miro customers make informed decisions when starting to use the product as it allows them to understand Miro’s levels of accessibility compliance.

All end users users who access Miro using a screen reader and keyboard can now manage profile details. Users can:

• Update their information like first & last name, company name, industry, and role

• Upload, change, and remove their profile photos

• Change their email address and password

• Delete their profile

• Manage integrations from the Integrations tab

We also added support for the main flows of Miro Company & Team admins on the Enterprise Plan. It’s now possible to use keyboard and screen-reader navigation to:

• Search and navigate to teams

• Create new team(s)

• Manage team profile

• Search, browse, and filter active users

• Change user roles and license types

• Change security settings of the organization and individual teams

We also added alternative texts to key elements of Miro UI to make our product even more screen-reader friendly.

Please, stay tuned for more updates as our accessibility team is working on making collaboration in Miro even more inclusive

We are working on making Miro more accessible, and released the first significant bundle of product improvements for screen reader users. 

Screen reader users don’t need to take any additional steps to activate the accessibility functionality – when you open a Miro board with your screen reader, you will hear a prompt to activate screen reader mode.

Now screen reader users can be invited to Miro boards. Sign up & sign in are screen-reader friendly, it is possible to navigate through the Miro dashboard to open the required board, and the main types of board content such as frames, sticky notes, and shapes can now be perceived with the help of the screen reader. 

Please, note, that the flow described above works the best for:

• Users invited to the existing team on the Enterprise Plan

• Users on Team, Business, Consultant, Education or Enterprise Plan that are invited directly to the board as anonymous Guest Editors 

All of the flows described above are currently only available on the desktop. 

The current solution is read-only making it possible for users to access existing board content with the help of the screen reader, and does not allow creating or editing content on Miro boards yet. 

We will continue working on making Miro more accessible, and are planning to support other possible setups in the future. 

Visit the Help Center and watch the product video to learn more.

We have been focused on making Miro more accessible since the beginning of 2021. Today we are excited to share the first updates as we release the beta version of the following accessibility features:

• Sign-in and sign-up flows now better support keyboard navigation

• We unlocked basic dashboard navigation for screen-reader users: you can choose a project for your team and pick a board using your keyboard

• The color contrast of the UI elements on the board is WCAG2.1 AA compliant

All of the improvements described above are currently being tested with Miro users and leading UX & accessibility consultants, and our team will continue enhancing the existing functionality as well as adding new features to make our product even more accessible.

If you are interested in participating in the user testing phase of accessibility features, please, email us at [email protected]