Discourse with a screen reader

UX
,
27

A list, in no particular order with the exception of the first item:

  1. You have modals that don’t grab focus, which was what made me write this post in the first place. Anyone coming to this thread to give screen reader usage feedback is going to hit one of these, meaning that basic/intermediate screen reader users are filtered out. I haven’t hit this on my forum, thankfully, just here. Hopefully there’s some way I can turn these off, or at least, turn off whatever conditions would cause one to appear. The only way to interact with these is to wonder why none of your keyboard commands aren’t working, and to know enough about how web apps work to think of hunting for a modal. Then, once you’ve found it, you have to interact with it and navigate focus to the correct control. And even then it isn’t always reliable, as exhibited by my struggles replying to this topic.
  2. When I click a topic, keyboard focus doesn’t move automatically to the newest post. I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen here, so maybe there’s a different link I need to accomplish this? As such, keeping up with new posts is hard, and something I still have to do manually.
  3. There is no apparent way to reach my site administration area via the keyboard. I had to guess that /admin might work as a URL, and fortunately it did.
  4. ARIA landmarks in the forum posts would be useful. Essentially, make each post something like an <article/>, with <heading/> for the top controls and <footer/> for the bottom. This enables faster navigation by landmark, since there aren’t currently useful ways to move between posts quickly. I can sort of do that now via NVDA, but doing so drops me on the including the Like and other buttons. If the actual landmark elements won’t work, a role= attribute will.
  5. If I click the Topic actions button, there is no way to close the menu that appears via the keyboard.
  6. Your list widgets are kind of an accessibility disaster. I just tried moving a post with NVDA. Here’s how I did it:
  7. Clicked the Edit title/category button. I don’t remember exactly what this was called since, again, I can’t collapse the screen to get the button back.
  8. Found the category combo box.
  9. Activated it with space.
  10. Used NVDA object navigation to zoom into the selected combo box item, which was not at all intuitive.
  11. In that item, there is a list. I interact with it.
  12. In that list there is a search field, and another list. I interact with that other list.
  13. I then move through what appear to be a bunch of category descriptions, again with NVDA object navigation, until I find the one I want. I route the mouse to that.
  14. I click the mouse with NVDA.
  15. I suspect there’s another step where I have to find and click an unlabeled Save button, but I’m not sure and certainly won’t remember this the next time I have to do it. :frowning:
    As you might imagine, this is not intuitive, and something I only discovered because a) I’m probably an intermediate NVDA user b) I do web development among other things and c) I’ve kind of learned the ways in which Discourse does things.
  16. There are various unlabeled graphics which don’t identify as buttons, but which appear to do things. I think the Save buttons in the admin screens are an example. I’m sort of hesitant to randomly click unlabeled buttons on a live site relied on by users. That kind of thing is likely to bite me in a painful place someday. :slight_smile:

I’ll give things about a month, then I’ll slap PHPBB or something more accessible on a server and we’ll just go with that. Sorry, I’ve got a lot of folks not even giving the community a shot because of these issues, and given that the broken modal was quite literally the first speedbump I hit, I’m probably going to have to do what we as blind folks do far too often and pick the technically inferior but more accessible option. :frowning: Not trying to be grumpy, I just wish my choices for community weren’t a bunch of accessible options with smaller communities and less development, a great option with major accessibility issues, and mailing lists.

BTW, I’m a senior developer available for hire if you need help. To be frank, Discourse is eating enough of the internet that a bunch of us with disabilities have to grudgingly deal with accessibility issues like these when our well-meaning able-bodied colleagues set up a Discourse for their projects. And I get why they do, because I’d very much like to use it for our community, and you’ve created a product that is amazingly easy to administer. But if you don’t have an accessibility lead fixing current brokenness and ensuring that all new features are usable by people with disabilities, then let’s talk please, because you desperately need one. :slight_smile: The only reason I tried Discourse here is because I came away from this thread thinking that major accessibility changes were imminent. But in general, I actively discourage Discourse use whenever I have a say in it because of how hard it is to use with a screen reader, and because I don’t want to create another internet community where we as blind people can’t participate equally because of access issues. I’d love to change that, and to be a part of making that change happen. But if not me, then please bring someone on, because many of these issues have been around for years and haven’t changed to any significant degree.

Thanks.

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