Gitter a11ySlackers Sidecar

Animated image of the Gitter sidecar with the a11y Slackers channel embedded on my site.
Animated image of the Gitter sidecar with the a11y Slackers channel embedded on my site.

If you are unfamiliar with the a11y Slackers channel on Gitter, I encourage you to read Steve Faulkner’s post, Anybody can be an A11y Slacker. Essentially it’s an alternative to the accessibility channel on Slack.

Gitter recently released Sidecar, a method of embedding a Gitter channel on your site with a JavaScript snippet. While it offers some customization options, I opted to use the default settings and embed it on this page (look in the bottom right corner). You can do the same on your favorite web-o-tron page with the following code:

<script>
  ((window.gitter = {}).chat = {}).options = {
    room: 'w3c/a11ySlackers'
  };
</script>
<script src="https://sidecar.gitter.im/dist/sidecar.v1.js" async defer></script>

Steve Faulkner noted that it has some accessibility issues, but tracked down the GitHub repo for Sidecar so that anyone can submit fixes. He also found a place to start to make it into a sidebar in Firefox after I lamented that I would like to see it as a browser extension. It’s unlikely I’ll do anything about it in the near future, sadly.

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