Making your Dropbox account accessible for your needs

[Amy]

Update added January 12th: 

You might have seen us share this content piece a few weeks ago, and we’re so glad that so many of you have read it, but now we want to know more about how you really use Dropbox. We would love to know more about how you set up your account, how you navigate and overall, how you make it work for you. The more we understand how you use Dropbox, the better we can share tips or stories that might benefit you, and we can share your feedback with the rest of the Dropbox team too. Do you have a specific way you currently use Dropbox, or something you wish you could do with it? Join the conversation below! 

We recently received a question from a Community member asking for advice on how to set up a Dropbox account for an elderly family member. This prompted us to think about the different ways we can make Dropbox more accessible in general and to share tips from our Dropbox team and invite you to share yours too. Different people have different needs, and we want to ensure that everyone has a seamless experience with our products and features.

Whether it’s to make things easier to access due to vision, mobility, tech awareness, or just generally to improve your workflow, we’re hoping these tips can improve your Dropbox experience.

Navigation tips: 

Using Dropbox may be easier if you reduce the number of steps to get to the files you need. 

With that in mind, you can make a few improvements, like:

• Use your bookmarks bar: By adding Dropbox.com to your bookmarks bar, then you can navigate to your account in just one step.
• Star your files: By starring your favourite files and folders, you keep everything close by and easy to find. I keep my to-do list in the starred section to keep me honest.
• Adding a shared family folder: Your loved ones can add photos, documents or anything else you might need access to. 

Settings that might make your access easier:

There are some settings on your device or browser that can improve your experience too, we have just a few shared below but we would love to know what you do to make your account more accessible for you.

• Setting the view to match your needs, (not just to 100%) can make a big difference. You can either edit that with the view menu, or use a shortcut (command or control + to zoom in or command or control - to zoom out). 
• You can add auto-generated closed captions to any videos you create with Dropbox Capture, which means you can share more accessible videos with those with hearing impairments or who can’t play audio. It also means that when you’re watching a Capture video, you just need to click the ‘CC’ in the bottom right corner of the video player to turn captions on or off.
• Speaking of Capture, you can use Dropbox Capture to screenshot things with much less work. With Capture you can:
• Click once to screenshot of your entire screen.
• Click and drag to screenshot a desired area of your screen.
• Press the spacebar to screenshot a specific image.

Whatever your needs or preferences, we want to make sure that you can use Dropbox in a way that works for you, or for your friends and family. We would love to know if these tips are helpful, or any other useful things that you have used - so tell us below!

[froanc]

After one set his dropbox to stock every picture from his smartphone, it would be a good idea to launch a pop up with a question: 'want to save this one to your Dropbox' ? If you DON'T reply with a yes or no, you're taking to your Dropbox on your smartphone, where you still have to enter your password only to enter the box. I'm sure a lot of elder people will remember that one, because they shoot a lot of pictures, and that way they will remember that a 'short cut' to their Dropbox is NO reply to the question after they've taken a picture.....if you read this it may sound a little complicated, but think about it how easy it is to remember, and so obvious that others will not think of that

[Amy]

Hi @froanc, thanks for your feedback, we will pass this on to the team. I totally agree that it can be easy to overlook the 'obvious' options sometimes. Let us know if you have any other suggestions for making Dropbox more accessible - I'm definitely still learning here 🙂 

[CQ77]

Great that captions are an option but they need to be editable by the capture creator. The automatic captioning software is not always accurate.