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!