Update

In response to this blog post, and without any outreach or advocacy on my part, I received the following email from the developers of Jami:

Hi,

I’m a developer on Jami and came across your recent article about accessibility in our app. I'm reaching out by email as I wasn’t able to leave a comment directly on the article.

First, let me sincerely thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We're truly sorry that the desktop version of Jami does not currently meet accessibility standards.

Very recently, we held a meeting with an accessibility expert to identify key issues and define the next steps toward making Jami more accessible across all platforms. I will personally begin working on significant improvements to the desktop client’s accessibility in the coming weeks, and we hope to make substantial progress in the next few months.

Your feedback plays a crucial role in helping us understand where we need to do better, and we really appreciate it.

Best regards,

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Original Post

I really like the mission and features of Jami. It's free and open source, fully peer to peer, completely encrypted, and available on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. It allows distributed sharing of files and text, as well as making voice and video calls. It also includes SIP support, and an easy config file to edit if you want to change advanced settings like the codec and audio processing. As a bonus, it's even developed right here in Canada! The peer to peer nature of Jami means that even if your internet access is down, you can still communicate with people on your local network, and when you're sending files, they don't transfer through a central server, making it much faster.

I first installed it on IOS, and the interface was pretty much perfect. That got my hopes up...but unfortunately, it uses QT6 on desktop. While it's possible to make QT apps accessible, it's much harder than using native controls, and Jami doesn't even get close. There are lots of unlabeled buttons and you can't tab to read incoming messages. Scanning the QR Code to link your accounts is a fairly easy process. But after that, you're out of luck.

Never the less, I'm actually finding Jami a fast and reliable way to share things quickly between my laptop and computer, without using a central server or having to enter IP addresses, requiring the network to support bonjour or other discovery protocols, or even having my computer and phone on the same network. But at the moment if you want to actually chat with others, you need to use mobile.

If you want to try it yourself, you can find me on Jami under the username fastfinge and drop me a message. In spite of the flaws, I hope Jami continues to improve. We need a chat app that's decentralized the way skype used to be.