Miro Accessibility

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 accessibility@miro.com.

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 accessibility@miro.com