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by chown 843 days ago
It's very nice that there exists something like that. I am an author of one of the similar apps [1] someone listed in a different thread. I was hoping I could get in touch with someone like you who could give me some feedback on how to make my app more accessible for users like you. I really want to it be an "LLM for all" kind of app but despite my best efforts and intention, I suck at it. Any chance of getting in touch with you and get some feedback? Only if you want and have time, no pressure at all.

[1] https://msty.app

2 comments

Sure, I'll probably join the discord tomorrow morning, but a few notes:

* For apps like this, using live regions to speak updates may be helpful. either that or change the buttons, like from "download local AI" to "configuring." Maybe a live region would be best for that one since sighted people would probably be looking near the bottom for the status bar, but anyway... * Using live regions for chats is pretty important, because otherwise we don't know when a message is ready to read, and it makes reading those messages much simpler. The user types the message, presses Enter, and the screen reader reads the message to them. So, making a live region, and then sending the finished message, or a finished part of a message, to that live region would be really helpful. * Now on to the UI. At the top, we have "index /text-chat-sessions". I guess that should just say "chats"? Below that, we have a list, with a button saying the same thing. After that list with one item, is a button that says "index /local-ai". That should probably just be "local AI". Afterwards, there is "index /settings", which should just be "settings." Then, there is an unlabeled button. I'm guessing this is styled to look like a menu bar, across the top of the window, so it'd be the item on the right side. Now, there's a button below that that says "New Chat^N". I, being a technical user, am pretty sure the "^N" means "Control + N", but almost no one else knows that. So, maybe change that text label. Between that and the Recent Chats menu button are two unlabeled buttons. I'm not sure why a region landmark was used for the recent chats list, but after the chat name "hello" in this case, where I can rename the chat, there is an unlabeled button. The button after the model chooser is unlabeled as well. After the user input in the conversation, there are three unlabeled buttons. After the response, there is a menu button with (oh, that's cool) items to transform the response into bullets, a table, ETC. but that menu button was unlabeled so I had to open it to see what's inside. After that, all other buttons, like for adding instructions to refine this message, are also unlabeled.

So, live regions for speaking chat messages and state changes like "loading" or "ready" or whatever (keep them short), and label controls, and you should be good to go.

Live regions: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

Wow! This is already very helpful and was the kind of feedback I was looking for. Thank you!
Hi, I just use msty. Could it use an already downloaded gguf file?
Not right now but that’s something we plan to support soon. Supporting Ollama downloaded models is getting released either today or tomorrow, gguf support might go into the next release. Would love to chat with you to learn more about your use case. Mind saying hi on our Discord?