Agenda has received many accolades for its features and design, but much to our regret that couldn’t be said for its accessibility. We couldn’t be more happy to say this will all change with the upcoming v11 update.
The iOS and iPadOS version are now fully accessible through VoiceOver and VoiceControl et al., and brings Agenda in a completely different league from before.
The macOS version is getting these improvements as well but this is still a work in progress and while improved already, will probably take another few smaller updates before it’s where we’d like it to be.
To help us test these changes and to make it perfect we need your help and feedback. You can sign up for beta testing here: Can I join the Agenda Beta program?
I just got on board with Agenda on both iOS/iPadOS and MacOS. And I was immediately impressed with the well-done VoiceOver support especially on iOS. I do have a few things to comment, and hope that these will help improve Agenda even more. In fact, I am thinking of reviewing it on my German language blog.
iOS
The overlay that covers the screen if you don’t have any projects or notes yet, except for the sample projects, indeed covers the whole screen, making the other controls hard to reach when using touch exploration. There doesn’t seem to be a way to dismiss this item except by creating a new project or note.
In the Inspector, I have run into the situation that the current Calendar and Reminder items for today’s date disappeared from VoiceOver’s view. I think what I did was swipe to the right repeatedly from the title bar at the top. When VoiceOver entered the main area, all the labels for items were lost, and when then dragging my finger across, this was only finding a bunch of unlabeled items. They were distinct items, but the labels were gone. I had to close Inspector by somehow finding the Project Overview button, and then reopening it. I could repeat this twice, so maybe this is reproducible for you as well.
MacOS
No matter what I do, the left column with the project overview stays empty. The table is there, but when interacting with it using VoiceOver, there is no content inside the table. This is regardless of which project I have selected. If I bring up the Project Overview or Project List with Ctrl+1, the table in the pop-over is accessible. Really strange.
I am noticing some inconsistencies when interacting with individual notes. Sometimes, the hierarchy for the note’s controls, inside each scroll area, get out of order, or I land in a note I didn’t expect. I haven’t found a pattern to this yet, though.
But as I said earlier, the level of VoiceOver support is impressive. And these are probably some corner cases I am hitting which can hopefully be fixed. Let me know if I can help or provide any additional info.
All of this is in version 13 on both iOS 14 and MacOS 11.
Thanks Marco, really happy you like the accessibility features and are helping us to make them better. We’ll have a look at the items you mention and will see if they can be improved.
That‘s great to hear! Feel free to send me a TestFlight invite or Mac beta builds to the email address associated with this account as well. I‘m an experienced beta tester of various known iOS apps.
Thanks, I just accepted it and am now also going to switch over the Mac version to beta. Also, feel free to let me know if a FaceTime call or such would be benefitial in showing you some of the issues I am finding.
