Hey folks,
Not sure if this is known or tracked anywhere. If so, I’d welcome links. But, while it is improving, the experience of using Discourse with a screen reader has a few challenges that I wanted to document.
I’m a screen reader user, and wanted to set up a self-hosted instance mostly targeted at blind users. I normally don’t recommend Discourse because of accessibility issues, but you’re making self-hosting with the features I want very easy, so it makes me sad that accessibility isn’t quite there. Here are some of the challenges I’m facing:
- The dropdowns that report to my screen reader as HTML
<select/>
s are almost entirely broken. They do expand via normal keyboard conventions, but that’s about where the accessibility ends. The challenges began when I had to select a language during setup. I’m not immediately sure if English: US was defaulted, but when I went to investigate, I’d managed to set the language to Spanish and had a hard time getting it back. I eventually found the list with my screen reader and managed to correct it. But just about every dropdown is broken. I don’t want to say “every” in case there’s one on some far-flung corner of the interface that works, but every one I’ve tried doesn’t work at all. - I can’t find a way to the admin interface without navigating directly. The setup screens told me it was under the gear icon, but I can’t find a textual representation of what the gear icon might be, nor do any of the keyboard-accessible controls I’ve found seem to ultimately link to an admin interface. For now I’m just hitting /admin, but this makes me wonder what tools I may not be discovering because I can’t find this gear.
- Related to the settings dropdown, I can’t use the dropdowns/selects at the top of category lists to navigate to the lists of categories. I know about the Categories link, which is what I generally use. But it’d be nice if those selectors worked.
- Whenever I don’t sign up for a Discourse, I’m told that I should in part because the forum remembers where I stopped reading. This has never worked for me with a screen reader. How is it supposed to work? Should clicking the link move focus to whichever post I read last?
- And not related to my site, but the modal signup experience here had some challenges. I tried signing up by email, but your instance rejected my .info email address which I’ve used for nearly 17 years and which worked fine on my own. I then signed up via Google, but the modal I was given on return posed some challenges:
- It didn’t grab keyboard focus, so I had to hunt it down and interact with it myself.
- While I was trying to do that, the infinitely scrolling topic list was adding new topics in and making it more difficult for focus to actually reach the dialog. I don’t remember how exactly I managed to move quicker than the topics appeared–haven’t had my coffee yet–but I’m here.
So, a few questions:
- I really want to stick with Discourse if I can. How much of this stuff can I change on my own site? In particular:
- Can I get rid of the category list selectors, so users have to interact with the category list link for now?
- Can I get rid of the category selector on new topic pages, so users have to first enter the category they want to post in, and can’t accidentally make uncategorized posts or otherwise get confused?
- Can I do both in a way that makes upgrading easy? I’d rather not edit stock templates and fork the project if I don’t have to, nor do I necessarily want an entirely new theme.
- Is this work being tracked anywhere, and is anyone dedicated to taking it on? Discourse forums are eating the internet. Everywhere I turn, the projects or communities I spend time in are adopting them. Hell, as a blind user, I want to run Discourse because, again, you make this so easy. I just don’t want accessibility of such a crucial tool to either be an afterthought, or to perpetually play catchup with new development.
Thanks for reading.