In a discussion titled ‘Accessibility and Patronizing language and euphemisms’ under the UX category, speeps reports that when JavaScript is disabled, Discourse displays a message — ‘Works best with Javascript’ — which they find misleading and patronizing, especially in German. They also note the site is entirely non-functional without JS, which poses a real accessibility issue for them due to sensory overload from web clutter. JammyDodger clarifies that Discourse does serve a read-only HTML view when JS is off — but only for older or non-JS-capable browsers. Falco explains this is a deliberate optimization: modern mobile browsers with JS disabled (like speeps using Chromium on GrapheneOS) are excluded from the fallback view to improve performance for the majority. The fallback view was never designed for mobile. Ed_S warns that optimizing for majority usage may unintentionally exclude vulnerable groups like the disabled, elderly, or disadvantaged. Falco disputes this, calling it ‘preposterous’ to assume such groups dominate the niche of custom JS-disabled mobile users. Ed_S counters that even small user segments deserve consideration, especially when accessibility is at stake, and hopes accessibility expertise informs Discourse’s design decisions.
I deactivate JS by default because websites are so full of clutter, things jumping around and visual noise that I can’t bear this at all without having apparently unusually high amounts of mental pain.
(
Another note, I was just told that new users couldn’t add more than 1 file.
That came after pressing send.
How about telling before sending?
)
Discourse serves a basic HTML read-only view when JS is disabled, or the browser version is too old and not supported anymore.
However, in a effort to reduce our request payload and get better speeds for mobile users, specially for users on old Android phones, we don’t ship the basic HTML view if we detect that the user-agent can handle JS just fine.
The trade-off is the behavior you just found, the intersection of the three groups:
User in mobile
User in a recent modern browser
User who manually disabled JS
Will get this sad screen, instead of the basic HTML view we ship for other users.
This was a deliberate choice after checking the number of users who would get a faster site against the users who would not.
That message is there for users who actually get the basic HTML view, like users in Internet Explorer 6.
We made no effort of making the basic HTML view scale well for mobile, as it was designed for search engine bots and users on old desktops. If you want to see how it would look, you can try sending an old browser UA string.
Otherwise, you will need to hit that JS toggle and enable JS for Discourse.
I think this is crucial - if you just look at the proportion of users affected, you might miss the demographics. You might be excluding an unintentionally large proportion of the disabled, or the elderly, or the disadvantaged.
It’s preposterous to say that any minority group would be over represented in the demographic of people running custom mobile browsers with javascript disabled.
Maybe, maybe not. But more generally, making design decisions based on an impact to only a small proportion of users seems potentially problematic to me. Support for older browsers, and for unusual ways of accessing the web, would fall inside that concern. I don’t know a lot about accessibility tactics - but I would hope someone does, inside the decision-making team for Discourse.
