Unboxing
Using the hanger for stores as a reference for the top of the box, find the two adhesive circles located on the longer sides of the box, on opposing sides.
Doing this allows you to remove the top section of the box (the one without the hanger attached) and put it aside.
On one side of the box there’s a quick start guide (duplicated online here on Elgato’s website) with aUSB cable underneath. If you gently lift this USB cable you’ll also be able to lift the Streamdeck itself free.
With the device out of the way, all that really remains is the stand for the unit. Though it might seem a little difficult to extract this, pull the part that stick up from this plastic stand down and to the right to flip the left-hand side of it and lever it free. The final element in the package is the “important safety information” leaflet.
The hardware
There’s not much to say about the design of the SD other than it’s metal, with 15 plastic buttons that are easy enough to differentiate between each other, though they are all identical in terms of feel or any discernable markings.
The stand is a little convoluted to describe in terms of how it actually is set up, I had sighted assistance the first time I figured it out. You could definitely learn how to unfold it and set it up with practice though, even without sight.
The Software
The software, as with all of Elgatos products I’ve used, is virtually inaccessible to screen readers. Buttons that should have labels, even without the device connected, only read “enter” for example. This is such a shame as it means you’ll need sighted assistance through the rest of this review
On plugging the device in, the firmware update was successful, though of course the screen reader only registered a button that was sated to be “ok enter”.
After hitting enter on this button, nothing appeared to happen. I was informed via sighted assistance that the SD had a “welcome” button flashing as the very middle button of the device. My point above about no discernable markings was proven incorrect, as the middle button, much like those on a phone keypad, has a small tactile marker to differentiate it from the rest.
Pressing this button produced a rather satisfying tactile response as well as launching the Wecome To Stream Deck page found at this page on the website.
In the main SD window, there are in fact controls that work partially as intended, like the action selector tree view which is fully readable. What isn’t workable with a screen reader, however, is the main point of the SD, namely assigning actions to keys. This is because the software relies on the use of a mouse to drag and drop actions. You can’t even close down edit boxes without using the mouse, which is a real negative when it comes to ease of use.
Once set up, however, the SD works extremely well, launching websites and applications with literally just the press of a button. Even switching it from one machine to the other is made easier by the fact that not only can you copy profiles from one computer to another, but if you want to use different functions on different computers, you won’t have issues either.
Summary
Pros
- Well-built and solid design
- Buttons are extremely responsive
- Useful not just for streaming, but other tasks like launching applications, or even shutting down your computer with a shortcut
- Natively supports a wide array of actions that can be useful in different contexts
Cons
- Software has little to no labelling for easy use with screen readers.
- Software assumes the user can use a mouse/pointing device to do everything, including entering/existing edit boxes or activating many controls.
- Proprietary cable, even though the XL has a replaceable one.
- Device can easily slide out of the stand, even though the XL has a magnetic one that would be great to see on this product as well.