Accessibility Options on Slack

Working my way through Slack over the last few months I’ve happened upon some accessibility options which some users may find helpful. Accessibility helps to remove barriers that prevent users interacting with some services. You may already use some accessibility features in some of your technology and not even realise (for me it’s increasing text size on my browser because of poor eyesight).

Colour blind options

You can change the colour theme of your sidebar to be more accessible to folk with different type of colour blindness. To do this you need to open up your preferences. You can either do this by pressing cmd + , or you can click on your team name and navigate down to Preferences. You then need to click on Sidebar and scrolling down you will see that there are (currently) 8 different themes. The two at the bottom are accessible themes for folk with colour blindness, made with certain colours in mind. There are two different options, one for Protanopia & Deuteranopia, and one for Tritanopia.

Increase text size

If you have difficulty seeing the default size of text on Slack you may want to increase it. To do this you need to navigate back to Preferences (cmd + ,) and select Accessibility. Here you can change the zoom on your text so you can make it larger (also smaller if you want to pack more on your screen).

Turn off animation

You may have noticed if you followed the steps for increasing text size that there was an option at the bottom of the Accessibility screen for allowing animated images and emojis. This is where you can turn them off. This is helpful if you have a visual issue that makes focusing on screens difficult when there is movement (Also useful for that team member that loves posting lots of annoying gifs!).

I would love to hear if you know of any other accessibility options that Slack has so I can include them in this post. Contact us!