Over the past months, we’ve been improving the accessibility of both our desktop and mobile apps, in particular to better support visually impaired users.
Now, we need your help! We’re inviting visually impaired users to test the latest pre-release versions and share their valuable feedback.
Here’s how you can help:
Download the latest pre-release version on desktop or Android.
Explore the app using your own screen reader or any other tools you’re familiar with.
Let us know your thoughts: What works well? What could be better?
Your feedback is crucial in helping us refine the app and create a more accessible experience for everyone. Thank you for helping us build a better, more accessible app!
I would like to add my 2 cents as an individual using exclusively monochrome screens (Eink devices, Boox brand e.g. Boox Tab Ultra, grayscale only, no color) and computer monitors with little screen real estate (small 13" eink monitors (e.g. Dasung Paperlike) with low resolution 800x600).
Joplin Mobile (Android)
Contrast is very good and lack of color is never a problem. Kudos! If only all other Android apps were like this
Joplin Desktop (MacOS)
Same good thing about contrast and lack of color.
However not ideal when you have little screen real estate. To understand my point of view, simply switch your resolution to 800x600 and try to work with Joplin for a few hours. You will struggle to choose a layout that let you see enough of notebook list, note list and note content all at the same time. What is needed is a solution to quickly collapse some of those three panes and/or quickly toggle the note editor to full screen. I guess several solutions are possible, not going to push for a specific one. You can make your own opinion by trying 800x600 resolution.
Final note : if you ever implement Dark mode, please absolutely add an easy option for Light mode. Forcing dark mode on everyone would be a big mistake, it looks terrible on eink. Looking at you, DroidFS.
In case anyone has the same need, I achieved this today with BetterTouchTool on MacOS. A single key press now toggles both the notebook list and the note list to make the current note full screen. It works so well that I can now use the split editor view, which I couldn't before. FWIW.
I've been trying out Joplin extensively over the last week with some friends on Mac, Windows and iOS, and I immediately fell in love with the app. Especially on the desktop the way the controls feel so native with the screen reader and keyboard shortcuts even though it's a web app, coupled with how well the autocomplete reads in the "go to anything..." screen makes it an absolute breeze to find what I'm looking for.
The app is also really good on mobile, again everything reads really well with VoiceOver on iOS at least. I do have 2 things to report about the iOS app:
VoiceOver has a 2-finger scrub gesture which can be normally used to back out of almost any screen, I believe programatically this is called the "Accessibility Escape." This doesn't work in the Joplin app, so if I want to IE back out of a note I have to manually find the back button and press it. Other places where I think it would be useful for this gesture to work is closing the sidebar, the note actions menu and a dropdown menu if one is open.
Speaking of the note actions menu the focus behaves slightly weirdly when you open it, because I can still swipe right to all the elements on the screen instead of just the action menu items. Also, if I touch outside the menu to the rest of the screen - the place I can tap to dismiss the menu, it's announced by VoiceOver as an unlabeled element which just makes a click. Usually in a situation like this tapping outside a menu like this is read by VoiceOver as "Dismiss popup" or some variation of it.
Other than that, the mobile app works just as well as the desktop one and I know quite a few people who have long been looking for a good and accessible cross-platform note taking app that can support both Windows and iOS equally well and Joplin is perfect for this.
Thank you for mentioning this! React Native has an onAccessibilityEscape property that should be usable in the mobile app.
Thank you for reporting that!
The note actions menu currently uses the react-native-popup-menu library. Joplin is already working an accessibility issues in the library (manually auto-focusing the first item). We're looking into switching to a different library or implementing the popup menu as a custom component.
Hello. I'm a blind software developer who has been searching for a notetaking system for years, and Joplin seems like it might be that. Systems I've tried that haven't stuck or just plain didn't work:
Obsidian: wasn't very accessible when I tried and I didn't have the cycles or willingness to debug a closed-source app.
TiddlyWiki: I wish I could have liked it but the syntax for things was pretty symbol-dense.
silverbullet.md: worked OK but I didn't want to maintain a separate server.
So far I'm liking Joplin. I've:
Created notes for my last year of major purchases, including each product manual as an attached PDF. The PDF viewer seems to work mostly well here. Manuals appear inline in my notes next to any I write myself (E.g. button layouts, API connection details, etc.)
I'm using journaling plus this inline todo plugin to track tasks along with their context. I think this will stick for me in a way standalone todo/task-tracking systems haven't since it isn't a separate thing I have to go to just for tasks.
So far it's working very well. Here are my biggest challenges/pain points:
My sense of the UI is that there are 4 fairly large regions--notebook sidebar, notes sidebar, editor, and preview. I wish I could move between these more easily. I'd expect F6 to help here but a) there doesn't appear to be a command or thing I can bind for this and b) the defaults bind it to Search, which feels odd. I'd like it if F6/shift-F6 navigated back and forward between these areas like it does in other native apps (maybe just on Windows, not sure.)
Related,: maybe each of these could be its own ARIA region? Then I could at least use screen reader commands to navigate between these sections.
I think I'd find the preview more useful if I could get to it more quickly. In particular, I'd probably link more things if I could click them more easily, and I often find myself wanting to quickly check off a task without having to manually edit it. That's a bit related to my above points, but given the fact that the only way to navigate to links and such that I'm aware of is by clicking them in the preview, having some way to quickly jump to the final product of all this notetaking feels especially useful. I almost wonder if optionally putting it in a modal so tab/focus can't escape might be useful, though that should be an option and not a replacement for the inline view. Right now I have to exit focus mode, move to the end of the document, and navigate backwards to find the beginning/relevant bits of the preview. If each of these was a region, then with NVDA for example I could use shift-d to move to the previous landmark/region, which would be the beginning of the preview.
Right now I'm using a combo of tabbing around/the command pallet. I wonder if the ARIA toolbar pattern might be useful in a couple places? In particular, the New note/todo" buttons feel like they could be collapsed to a single tabstop and navigable with left/right arrows. Likewise for the single "Synchronize" button if there's ever any other control in that strip. Not a huge difference, but fewer tabstops would at least make navigating between regions a bit easier until something larger lands. Might also be useful for the buttons to toggle/reverse note sort order but I'm not entirely sure.
There's a region where status messages and such appear but it's a bit confusing. For instance, here's what's there right now for me and has been for the last several minutes (note the raw HTML):
The note was successfully moved to the trash. <a href="#" class="cancel" data-lastDeletion="{"noteIds":["3a228337c9f94d58a92b113b13eafba1"],"folderIds":[],"timestamp":1738004505109}" id="deletion-notification-cancel-447022">Cancel</a>
Questions about this specifically:
I'm guessing this should be some sort of actionable notification area? If so then it should be a region too.
Do these notifications stick around, and are there keyboard commands to dismiss/navigat them?
Look to how VS Code handles its notifications if you need a good example. I suspect something like its notifications area is what might be intended here, and VS Code has mostly nailed that interaction pattern IMO.
To be clear, these are my notes after using Joplin lightly/moderately over the past week or so, so it's pretty usable as is. Thanks for putting in all this effort!
Navigation shortcuts do exist, but they're perhaps a bit difficult to discover:
For "jump to" keyboard shortcuts, see the "Go" menu (the "Focus" submenu) for keyboard shortcuts that can be used to jump to the sidebar, note list, note body, or title.
On Linux and Windows, ctrl-shift-s should jump to the sidebar, ctrl-shift-l should jump to the note list, ctrl-shift-n should jump to the note title, and ctrl-shift-b should jump to the note body.
Here are some options for making these more usable:
Create a "keyboard shortcut tour" screen.
List them as part of the command palette search results.
As you commented, add "next panel" and "previous panel" shortcuts.
At least on Windows and Linux, F6 and shift-F6 do seem to be standard — they can be used in Windows File Explorer, LibreOffice Writer, and, as commented above, VSCode.
ARIA regions
As of Joplin 3.2.12, the sidebar, note list, and editor should each be in a separate region. In particular,
Sidebar: role=navigation and aria-label=Sidebar.
Note list: role=navigation and aria-label=Note list.
Editor, title, and viewer: role=main and aria-label=Note.
There's currently no separate region for the viewer.
For me, NVDA on Windows 11 lists these landmarks in the "Elements List" dialog (NVDA-F7) and they do seem navigable with shift-d. If the landmarks don't show up in the "Landmarks" section of this dialog for you, please let me know!
One possible cause of this issue: I've noticed that when I use F10 and F11 to hide and show the note list and sidebar, there's no screen reader feedback that anything changed. Does activating "Reset application layout" from the "View" menu make it possible to jump to the sidebar and note list using shift-d?
It's possible to do something similar to this, but it could be improved:
ctrl-l is mapped to "toggle editor layout".
Pressing it once hides the viewer.
Pressing it a second time hides the editor and causes focus to jump to the viewer.
Issue: This shortcut is listed under the "View" menu, but still isn't very discoverable.
Issue: There's no screen reader announcement when hiding the viewer.
The "deleted" status message
Thank you for reporting this! Deleting a note certainly shouldn't announce raw HTML. The notification should auto-dismiss — it not doing so is a bug. I've opened a GitHub issue for this.
My mistake, I didn't try using regions heavily since I couldn't use them to bounce between the editor and preview, which is my biggest use case right now.
In my elements list for a currently open note, I have a couple targets with confusing labels (E.g. one titled "012" which I don't get, and another with the link text for an external link.) I don't tend to use the element list heavily so can't confirm how unusual or not this behavior is. I can confirm that navigating between landmarks works as described, though. Maybe just adding one for the preview would be sufficient?
Thanks a bunch for opening additional issues. Excited to see where this goes!
I've opened a pull request that should address this. The note viewer already has the frame role. However, it was incorrectly labelled as the "Note editor". The pull request changes this to "Note viewer".
