It's all well and good ssaying oh make your own but this isn't slapping code into BGT and throwing it out the door. There's a hell of a lot to do to put a Skype-esque system together, and the userbase would be tiny for any program. Skype is marketed, it's a part of Windows. So I get the redesign to fit with Windows 10 itself. Like I said, I like the interface and I actually.....you know.....I like what they are going for. Are they fully there yet? Not sure what their end goal is, I don't have access to those goals and none of us here do.....

Whining and crying 'but I have to use skype classic' won't solve anything at all though. MS is moving forward. They don't need to from their end, keep the older versions of software around. Remember, they cater to a very, VERY wide group of users with a lot of needs and uses. So.......consider that.

also for making your own. Consider this. Mozilla tried, and failed. Apple, MS, theirs are proprietary, there's a few open source alternatives out there but.....they are nowhere near the adoption rate of the big names. Here's the issue. You say oh, make our own one. Here's the other issue. If you make it for blind people, then you'll never get the traction it needs, and given how well projects get worked on and the pace of it with this community....yeah, it'll be stop and start and a little bit here and a tiny bit there and then it'll get dropped for something newer and shinier and forgotten about, at least if history is any indicator....

Lastly, @TGC: No, you missed the part of my post where I SPECIFICALLY mentioned the interface only and explained what I like about it. I'm agreeing with Crystal on this one. I like the web skype interface. Now, IF that is the interface in the updated Skype desktop, I'm fine with that. It's simpler to get around. Does the search suck? Yes. But overall from a pure interface point of view, is it quicker to get around? Arguably....yes.

first, please highlight the report button, I suppose it'll work as thumbs down.
Monday evening, after hearing the news on twitter, I made myself a restore point, and I installed skype 8 on my win7 dell that's currently my primary device. I should point out, that due to a rather nice sounding, but rather strangely laid out dell audio, and virtual audio cable, skype 7 never even accepted my internal microphone, I had to go into advanced, and almost drag and drop it, just so I could join calls with this thing. had to object navigate, and move the thing up the list. but hey, I managed it.
anyways, going back to skype 8. I tried the thing like 2 weeks ago, and I've literally rage quit it. this time, though, I've took about 5 minutes to carefully explore it. someone had a point, it kinda looks like the android app. you essentially have a conversation drop down list, you still have the invisible status, (yes, I love that thing) and in that menu, you can change a bunch of shits. it's also nice to see that NTM works in input fields on skype 8, whereas they don't work on the win10 app, because, well, keyboard clicks for the win.
do I love the thing? no I don't. did I revert to skype 7? no, I haven't, and am not likely to. do I miss certain features from skype 7? yes, I certainly do. we appear to only have 8, yes, that is a total of 8! skype commands, on the slash side of things. I'm also yet to figure out how to view/see people's details on their skype profiles, (I look at those things all the time) but other than that, I'd almost go as far as saying that I prefer it.
of course, not everything is beautiful. in skype 7, under communications tab, on the windows side, I clicked to do nothing with incoming calls. then in skype, I muted the ring tone. so if someone called me on the windows side, it would say something like meow calling alert, but it wouldn't interupt me, and if I didn't want to answer meow, well too bad, I didn't. with skype 8, though, and this pisses me off beyond words, you get that extremely loud musical damn ring tone, skype becomes full screen, if you reject the other end sees it, if you switch back apps the god damn ring tone continues to play. the sounds also seem to be incrypted, so I don't think I could force kill the ring tone that way, I could deal with the full screen thingy then. as for the win10 app, that, too, has improved a lot, but didn't play much with it so far. it does allow me to view all and every message I've ever sent on my skype, though, it allows me to view old messages, things that skype 8 doesn't, but I find that thing to be a tad too laggy for my liking, at least when I played with it.for people that are literally raging, and yes, there's a few, not so much in this topic, but I've seen plenty of those people, I have nothing to say, other than getting a good laugh out of it.
Microsoft forced win10 on us, win10 home users are still forced to update, unless you set your wireless metered. so I don't understand why people are surprised, this was known, and microsoft will continue to force you to update, as they have done in the past. sure, they listen to feedback, but their update policies haven't been redesigned.
if you have a skype account from anything after 2013, think it is, that account automatically becomes a Microsoft account, or has became one.

i dont know how to close the chat, too. it should be ctrl-f4, but it doesent work.

We have to fight back! Don't take this lying down. Fight them. If you let them win without a fight, you never had a chance. We have to fight hard. All of the solutions you gave are for Windows. What about Mac users? Fight them. Protest if you have to. I should know about protesting. I've done enough.

That may very well be so, but let's not derail a perfectly legitimate topic with this crap yet again.

And, there's really no point in fighting it anyway. Once Microsoft makes up their mind about something, or any corporation that can throw their weight around as well as they can, for that matter, a few blind people throwing a fit isn't going to change a thing. Now that I have the NVDA add-on for the new app installed, it's tolerable, although I still would like keyboard shortcuts, and I really do despise those Cortana suggestions. I find them creepy.

Those suggestions are creepy... I still have classic on my computer but my iPhone has the new interface and theirs no setting to turn them off... I don't care for cortana honestly, I'm kind of old fashioned when it comes to how i use my computer, and I like having control over it. And I guess having control over your computer and not having everything you do logged is considered old fashioned now.

Hi.
While I find it a bit sad that the easy skype experience will be gone, I don't really use it anymore for massive conversations, i think I talk to two people and a group regularly, else I have team talk or team speak.
I at leased hope that the mac app will stay sort of accessible.

Greetings Moritz.

windows isn't so bad though after i tried it with jaws. i will be doing for nvda soon. it works fine for brousing and typing in chats. there's an nvda addon written by dug lee that you should try. over all if you're a jaws user and get the scripts you'll be fine. maybe the screen readers might get a better sullution than scripts and addons but only time will tell. in the mean time it isn't so bad really as long as you know the new hotkeys and use aplication mode

Not being able to have chats in separate windows or minimize the thing to the system tray is bad enough. I say again, with how the new Skyep is, I may as well just use Skype for Web in a browser, which is ridiculous.

Peter Skillmen, the Director of Design for Skype, told me that they plan to add multi-window support at some point when I asked about this via Twitter. I seriously don't know how doable this is in an Electron app. Wouldn't that just take more resources since each chat would be in its own chrome window?

have you people actally read the posts? if you had you would know that pressing alt f4 minimizes the app and ctrl+q quits it

I'm getting used to the electron skype by the time. The thing that annoys me is that when i press enter on one of my chats, it jumps to my info and i should press shift tab a tun of times to get to the message editor. Also if we could have the nvda+control+number 1 to 0 for reading chats in this thing would be awesome

Hey kianoosh, this happens sometimes but you do not have to shift tab a bunch of times. Switch to browse mode with insert space, and then press e once and you will navigate to the edit field for typing a message.