What's new? v2
The focus for work in March will be:
- New templates for AMA/AUA (as me anything / ask us anything) messages
- Making it easier to use multiple cameras (including software cameras)
- Improve documentation, instruction, and notifications
Have an idea for making Keep Posted better? Let's talk!!
I'm really happy with how the work planned for February turned out, and I'm psyched to share this update! 🥳 🥳 🥳
The focus in February was on a new collaborative message type, (a lot of) accessibility improvements, and new ways to share messages with the team.
Watch a Keep Posted message about this month's updates, or keep reading below!
Daily standups shouldn’t disrupt people from their focused work
In a roundtable message, multiple speakers can respond to a single question or topic. It's an easy way to include the whole team in a message, and it works well for quick status updates or "get to know each other" type messages.
This feature also introduces a new way to invite people to join a message by sharing a preview link that will give team members the option of opting in.
This is less work for the creator, and gives participants control over whether or not they want to join a message.
Nobody should get left out of important communication
If some people on the team can't use audio, providing a text alternative lets them access the content of the message. These may be deaf members, or members who are viewing the message in a noisy environment.
Captions files can be attached to any Keep Posted message.
Currently the captions file needs to be created in a third party tool such as Rev or Happy Scribe. Here is a great list of captioning resources
This message (which includes captions) goes into more detail about the workflow of generating a captions file:
If accessibility matters to you, you should be able to easily figure out if it matters to me
An accessibility statement helps people with questions about accessibility quickly get answers without having to dig through the app on their own to discover if it will or won't suit their needs.
Keep Posted now has an accessibility statement prominently displayed in the footer of the home page. It will be updated as improvements are made.
What if you had to hitTAB15 times before you could do anything on a web page?
Skip links are not visible when using a mouse, but give keyboard-only users a way to quickly get to the main content of the page by skipping over the navigation sections.
Without page titles, it's really difficult for people using assistive technologies to understand what page they're on
Well-written page titles are an important navigation tool for people with visual disabilities because they are the first page element announced by screen-reading software.
This also benefits anyone who bookmarks a page within the app or regularly works with multiple tab open.
All pages within the Keep Posted app now have descriptive page titles.
The ability to use a mouse should't be a requirement for communicating with your team
Many people with motor disabilities rely on a keyboard, a modified keyboard, or other hardware that mimics the functionality of a keyboard. For Keep Posted to work well for these people, it must function without the use of a mouse in both the application (for message creators and admins) and the message display page (for message viewers).
This month, the following items were added or improved:
- Clear visual indicators when an interactive element has keyboard focus
- Logical navigation order as someone moves through the page
- Forms and dialogs are able to be interacted with via the keyboard
With one known excpetion (which is planned to be fixed in March), Keep Posted should now be fully keyboard accessible.
- Background information on message page
- Bug: Can't navigate into clips from the clips sidebar using keyboard navigation
- Bug: When using keyboard navigation, focus gets stuck in the edit message title field
- Bug: Tab order on message display page includes a lot of hidden elements
You probably don't want to share every single message with the entire company
When sharing a message to a connected Slack workspace, it doesn't always make sense to share the message with the entire workspace in the #general channel. Often the message is meant for a specific group. Now you can select any public channel that the Keep Posted app has been added to as the message destination.
Additionally, the text of the Slack message is editable now, and supports emoji, shortcodes, and @ mentions, just like a normal message in Slack would. This gives the message creator more control over the presentation of the message.
Because just sharing a URL link can be cryptic and weird
Sharing a plain URL is often clunky and lacks context that the viewers ought to have. A pastable invitation text option will give the message viewer more information about what the message is and why they should view it.
Copied invitations include:
- A call to action including the name of the message creator (example: "Robby invites you to watch a Keep Posted message")
- The title of the message
- A thumbnail of the first clip in the message
- A link to the message
The text of the invitation is also editable, so the creator can adjust it however they want.
Invitations include a plain-text and rich-text version automatically, so they should work anywhere that you try to paste them.
Opens up new possibilities for team participation
Some message types need input from other team members before the message has been completed. For instance, the Roundtable message template allows people to decide whether to opt-in to join the message.
A message preview page creates a home for in-progress features when the message requires it. There will more use cases for this coming soon!
- Convert
expandableelements to use HTML Detail tags - Message preview pages have incorrect open graph tags
- A participant can't view the preview page after they've recorded a clip
- Status messages (flash messages) on mobile are unstyled
- Deleting a message from the message detail page leads to an error page
January brought Keep Posted a new message template for meeting preparation, iOS support for message recording, a help/documentation center, and emoji support in clip titles. 🤘
- Keep Posted now works pretty well on iOS (It's slightly different than how it works everywhere else, and it still doesn't work on Safari for Desktop on MacOS)
- New Template: Prepare participants for upcoming meetings
- You can now edit the title of Keep Posted messages
- Keep Posted now has documentation and an issue tracker
- Messages are now hidden from search index robots
- When creating new clips, keyboard focus automatically goes to the subject field
- Title cards now support emoji 🎉🎉🎉
- It's no longer possible to attempt to build an empty message
- Message navigation is now visible when the browser is in dark mode
- Message player navigation is now expandable on Mobile
I'd really love to hear input on video messaging, team communication, and generally staying connected like a human being.
You can report a bug or suggest a new feature idea in the issues section. Or, if you just want to email me, you can do that here.