Here’s another enhancement that would immensely increase navigability for screen reader users. Screen readers render pages in what we call a virtual document. Basically multi-column layouts are reformatted into a logical order, mostly following the DOM order of elements. Other semantic information is exposed such as lists, tables, headings etc. We also have navigation keys available that are not browser shortcuts, but shortcuts specific to screen readers. One of them allows us to move quickly from heading to heading.
In Discourse, there is a H1 at the start of the topic, but no subsequent headings for each post. There are other headings strewn about, like for “suggested topics”, which are H3, and some links like to Github commits, which are H4. It would be very very very helpful if at the start of each post within a thread, there was a heading 2 to jump to so each post start can be found very easily. The author name is a possible candidate to be enclosed in such a h2 tag. It’s already there as a link, and that link would just have to be wrapped. Alternatively, text could be added that would contain text such as “post #5”. Not sure how that fits in the current design, but semantically, headings for each post within a thread make a lot of sense I think.