Accessibility Progress Updates

What has changed in QUILL’s accessibility, what is still open, and what we know is not yet good enough. The newest update is first. Our commitments are in ACCESSIBILITY.md.

A new update is written each month, prompted by the Accessibility feedback and progress issue that .github/workflows/accessibility-review.yml opens on the first of the month, and each release’s notes link to the latest one. Counts are counts of work, not a score: no number here says how accessible QUILL is.

October 2026

Completed

• We adopted the Open Source Accessibility Framework. QUILL now has an ACCESSIBILITY.md with priorities, contributor expectations, severity, response and resolution expectations, an owner, a dependency list and known limitations; an improved accessibility issue form with an email route; an accessibility checklist in the pull request templates; documented core-task tests; and resources other projects can reuse. 20 of the framework’s 24 actions are done, as recorded in our tracking issue.
• Every accessibility report gets a response and an outcome (from 2026-10-29). The accessibility-reports workflow acknowledges every report, reminds the owner after 5 business days without a reply, reopens a report closed without a documented outcome (a merged fix or an Outcome: line), and invites the reporter to confirm a fix. Past reports are not reopened: earlier gaps such as #804 and #999, closed without a written outcome, are history that the rule now prevents. See “How we respond” in ACCESSIBILITY.md.
• Tables are real tables in rich text (2026-10-26). A screen reader, Word and WordPad all read them as tables, and saved as RTF or Word the first row stays marked as the header row. Insert Table (Ctrl+Alt+T) asks whether the first row is a header, and in an HTML document marks header cells so a screen reader announces each cell’s column. See the CHANGELOG entry “Tables, What’s New and sliders: the latest work”.
• The arrow keys read a table cell by cell (2026-10-26), in both QUILL and QUILL Lite: Up and Down move within a column and say the cell, and leaving the table says “Out of table”.
• What QUILL speaks also reaches a braille display (2026-10-17). A new build gate, GATE-BRAILLE, fails any speech call that does not also write braille on the same path. See the CHANGELOG entry “GATE-BRAILLE: what QUILL speaks also reaches a braille display”.
• QUILL Lite’s braille goes through QUILL’s burst coalescer, and spoken AI answers are prepared for speech (2026-10-16), so a burst of messages does not flood the braille display and Markdown symbols are not read aloud. See the CHANGELOG entry “Five small fixes: braille bursts, speech-safe answers, Markdown kept, fallbacks asked, the watchdog in QUILL Lite”.

The full detail of every change is in the CHANGELOG.

In progress and open

• Recorded screen reader testing. The sign-off records for QUILL Lite 1.2.0, Quill Radio 3.2.0, QUILL Cast 2.0.0 and QUILL Transcribe 1.0.0 are pending, and the 316 checks in screen-reader-checks-2026-10.md have no results yet. The QUILL Transcribe screen reader pass in Outlook, Word, Notepad and the browsers blocks its 1.0.0 release. Help is wanted in #1694.
• Naming unlabelled controls waits on an upstream change in wxWidgets reaching wxPython; tracked in #1693, with the workaround described there.
• Heading structure in five documents, a good first issue: #1695.
• There were no open issues with the accessibility label before these three were filed. 110 issues carry the label in total, all closed; the most recent was closed in August 2026.

Known limitations

See Known limitations in ACCESSIBILITY.md.

Lessons learned

• Most of QUILL’s accessibility work this autumn was recorded in the CHANGELOG but not labelled as accessibility issues, which makes it hard to find from the issue tracker. From now on, accessibility work that has an issue gets the accessibility label, and each update here links to it.

How to help

Issues labelled accessibility; report a barrier with the accessibility issue form, from inside any app with Help > Get Help from Support… (Ctrl+Alt+F2), or by email to support@community-access.org.