Disability Discrimination by Discourse owners and racism too

[Peterz (Pete)]

I am pleading with you today to SUSPEND the planned abandonment of thousands of users who depend of the operating systems and browsers you casually plan to ditch in July.

As a disabled user I depend on 3rd party tools and software that require these platforms. Already I used several different browsers but all on Win7 platform, which I know is no longer supported, but without it I am unable to use the internet.

I am getting these messages about my browser no longer being supported on almost every device I have, you are hurting me (and others) on IOS 15 (which Apple continues to issue releases for) and on Win 7 browsers.

Needless to say I will have be make noises with the forums I engage with but I suspect they are too invested technically so I will have to beg them not to upgrade.

This really is a case of the tail wagging the dog, before I was crippled in car crash I had my own software company, we migrated from App to Web but we had a NO USER LEFT BEHIND policy.

In online advertising it would be considered abhorrent to eliminate users, in any website one never wants to eliminate users, each user will tell their friends how badly they have been treated.

Seriously, what are these amazing new features that nobody really needs which are apparently enough for you to ditch the disabled for?

Would it be that hard for you to continue supporting users on old platforms.

This is not just about the disabled, it hurts those who are economically deprived, especially in developing countries, which is racism. Yes it is, you are taking a deliberate act which disproportionately hurts people with a different ethnicity and colour to your own.

Now I am sure you will either shut down this conversion (which I will make on every site I find your platform being used on) or you will make some absurdly impractical suggestion that we upgrade our browser, which means our OS which means our computer which means our existing software which we need to use a computer WILL NOT WORK.

In the UK you are required to make reasonable adjustments and consider how your decisions impact the disabled, but let’s face it the economically deprived and disabled people are not going to sue you.

So all I can do is appeal to your better nature and ask that you put yourself in the position of those you affect, sometimes in life karma puts you in such a position.

Since creating my account here I can no long access the URL below which described the “dropping of the disabled”.

Dropping iOS 15 & other old browsers in July 2025

Following the next stable release in July 2025, Discourse will start using some modern browser features which are unavailable on iOS 15, and some other old browsers. Discourse’s minimum supported iOS version will be updated from 15.7 to 16.7. After that, visitors using older versions of iOS will be shown a basic-html version of community content, and won’t be able to login or interact with the site. Devices limited to iOS 15 are the iPhone 6s, iPhone SE (gen 1), iPhone 7, and iPad Mini 4. Thes…

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

I just can`t understand how this is matter of disability and racism. There must be some definition of those two that I’m not familiar with.

Anyway, this topic doesn’t bring anything new that aren’t already discussed in other topics.

[Ed_S]

@Jagster

I just can`t understand

Conversely, I can understand, and I feel this is important and is worth a new thread, even though observations, warnings, and complaints have appeared elsewhere.

If a person can’t see that there are issues with people who might be disabled or disadvantaged or otherwise restricted to use older devices, that’s a failure of empathy or a failure of imagination. Similarly if a person can’t see that not everyone is the administrator of the computer they use, and not everyone is using discourse in a context where they might also be doing banking or shopping.

Disenfranchising users ought to be seen as quite a serious problem, and potentially a legal hazard. In the USA, there is the ADA.

[tobiaseigen]

I’m sorry. This is not a productive topic so I have unlisted it and will close it. We do have empathy and wish we could support every device forever but this is not the world we live in. This problem has been discussed at length already in the other topic and we have ideas to address it such as the below from our co-CEO. It’s a big investment though so we can’t promise when or if such a fix will be implemented.

@sam

I understand this problem and want Discourse to reach as many people as possible. That said we also need a modern experience and we need to take a stance around the minimal requirements for a modern experience.

I feel like the long term possible solution here may be a “html+css” writable view.

All your 800 users will still be able to read and interact via email, that is not going to be lost.

Maybe the long term change here is that we will eventually provide a minimal ability to login and write in our html view so some of the more unfortunate can still interact on very old devices.

It is important to note that bargain oppo and techno phones will still run Discourse after this change, we are talking here about hand me down devices generally or people who can not afford to upgrade for 10+ years.