As a user who relies on screen reader technology to access technology, I have found that the Proton iOS apps are generally well designed for use with Apple's native screen reader, VoiceOver, but the same cannot be said of the web versions of their apps and especially the Windows apps, which are in some cases almost entirely inaccessible for screen reader users.
As a starting point, take what I imagine is your most popular core product, Proton VPN. The Proton VPN Windows app has numerous significant accessibility problems that make many basic features very hard to use and other features nearly impossible without sighted assistance.
Some specific recommendations to start out:
- Use standard Windows controls that comply with MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) standards. These should just work out-of-the-box, more or less, and not require too much manual effort to make more accessible.
- Ensure all your controls - buttons, tabs, links, menus, dropdowns, combo boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes etc - follow a logical tab order so that a user using the keyboard can easily navigate among controls on a view.
- Ensure that all form controls (like those mentioned above) are clearly labeled with text that can be read by a screen reader. If the control doesn't contain any visual text (such as a magnifying glass icon as a search button), use alt text that will be detected and announced by screen readers.
- Implement more comprehensive keyboard navigation support and make it easy for users to discover these keyboard commands. Usually, apps show a dialog of keyboard shortcuts when the user presses the question mark key.
- Specifically, implement F6 to move from one section of the app to the next and shift+F6 to move to the prior section. Sections might be the main panel where connection info is displayed, the side bar, other distinct areas of the screen.