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Slack Android

Definition

Slack Android is Slack's native Android client. The wiki's disclosures so far are accessibility-focused and come from the 2025-11-19 VPAT retrospective: how the team triaged accessibility issues surfaced by a 2024 third-party VPAT audit conducted after the IA4 redesign.

Known architectural details

  • Form-factor scope (as of 2025-11): phone only. Large-form- factor (tablet) support is not yet implemented, which is why the team explicitly deferred the WCAG 2.1.1 / 2.1.2 keyboard-navigation VPAT tickets as out-of-scope for the current form factor. (Source: sources/2025-11-19-slack-android-vpat-journey)
  • Component library: Slack Kit (SK) — shared mobile component library. Known SK components surfaced in wiki: OutlinedTextField, SKBanner, SKList, SKListAdapter, SK divider, and the new SKListAccessibilityDelegate introduced as part of the VPAT resolution.
  • Assistive-tech target: TalkBack (the built-in Android screen reader) is the primary target for Slack Android's accessibility work.

VPAT-driven accessibility corrections (2024-onward)

The 2024 VPAT audit surfaced 8 recurring themes on Android (documented in sources/2025-11-19-slack-android-vpat-journey); 7 resolved, 1 deferred. Mechanisms used:

  • Inline-error announcement — modified OutlinedTextField so TalkBack announces the error below the field when focus returns.
  • Banner-error announcement — updated SKBanner's error variant to auto-announce to screen readers.
  • SKListAccessibilityDelegate — new AccessibilityDelegate subclass on SKListAdapter overriding CollectionInfo so decorative SK divider items are excluded from the TalkBack "N items in a list" count. Canonical instance of patterns/accessibility-delegate-override-for-semantic-fix.
  • Custom TalkBack actions on drag-and-drop — workspace switcher Edit mode reveals six-dot drag handles visually + exposes "Move before" / "Move after" as TalkBack custom actions invocable via three-finger tap or L/r drawing gesture. Canonical instance of patterns/custom-talkback-actions-as-gesture-alternative.
  • Search-field icon labelling — added explicit magnifying- glass icon to the search edit field so its purpose is discoverable even after placeholder text is displaced by user input. Message-input area (AMI) left unchanged due to space constraints.
  • Error-icon redundancy — error text under edit fields now pairs with an error icon; colour is no longer the sole differentiator. Canonical instance of concepts/redundant-error-signalling.

Platform-convention divergences (closed without remediation)

  • Top-app-bar titles as headings — VPAT vendor suggested marking top-app-bar titles as headings (WCAG 1.3.1); Slack tested native Google apps, found the convention is not to mark these as headings, closed the tickets. Canonical instance of concepts/wcag-platform-applicability-gap.
  • Strikethrough announcement — VPAT vendor flagged that strikethrough text formatting is not conveyed to screen reader users; Slack consulted the blind community, concluded that most screen readers intentionally don't interpret strikethrough because it would be "verbose and potentially confusing". Closed without remediation; the lesson crystallised in the post is authors should avoid strikethrough formatting for accessibility reasons. Second canonical instance of concepts/wcag-platform-applicability-gap.

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