Accessibility: Latest posts on category page aren't visible to screen reader

AI-generated summary

A discussion on improving the accessibility of the Discourse categories page has been initiated by kevinrobinson. The issue is that the “latest posts” section on the categories page is not visible to screen readers due to its structure not being properly communicated through markup. kevinrobinson proposed resolving this by revising with header tags, adding accessibility landmarks, or using ARIA tags. notriddle created a pull request on GitHub to address this issue, which was reviewed and approved by kevinrobinson and later merged by awesomerobot.

This is split out from the master accessibility thread: Accessibility audit and shepherd for making improvements.

This topic is about the categories page, and the “latest posts” in the righthand column here:

Here’s the report:

This should be in the hierarchy. To be consistent should do it with a heading (another not as good way to solve this could be with a landmark or ARIA tag). This might be different on desktop vs. mobile layouts.

So my understanding here is that the structure of the page after all the headers is “a list of categories” and “a list of latest posts.” The markup here doesn’t indicate that, and so the ways to tackle that are to revise with header tags, to add accessibility landmarks, or to add ARIA tags to communicate that structure to screen readers.

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https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/5494

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@notriddle awesome, thanks for the help! I’m not sure if I should comment here or on GitHub, but I’ll respond here and let me know if I should move this to the pull request. :slight_smile:

This pull request looks good to me, and like it should help with navigating the “categories” and “latest” on the page. :+1:

1 Like

If this looks good @awesomerobot can we pull it in?

1 Like

Merged. Thanks @kevinrobinson & @notriddle

5 Likes