# Discourse with a screen reader

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-with-a-screen-reader/178105
**Category:** UX
**Tags:** accessibility, screen-reader
**Created:** [February 2, 2021, 1:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-with-a-screen-reader/178105 "2021-02-02T13:17:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 28

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### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 23, 2021, 7:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-with-a-screen-reader/178105/28 "2021-05-23T19:37:57Z")

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Wow! Thank you for the detailed and thorough feedback!

> [@nolan](#):
>
> 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

I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I’m not aware of any modals that appear on visiting a topic? Are you referring to the editor / composer that one uses to write replies to topics, which I am typing in right now? Are you referring to the editor that appears after you press a reply button anywhere in the topic?

Since this is the first and most urgent issue, I’d like to understand it. Let’s maybe go step by step and start with the most important issue, since we’ve had blind users before and have acted on their feedback in the past – for example here:

> [@Accessibility concerns re email, Lynx, JAWS](https://meta.discourse.org/t/accessibility-concerns-re-email-lynx-jaws/35675/15):
>
> We have in the past worked with 2 blind users to improve things (@MarcoZehe and @ndarilek ) see: We received advice from @stevefaulkner an expert in the field and acted on it. We will continue to improve Discourse based on feedback. As it stands the biggest pain point, which is a devil to solve is Email parsing. At the moment our parser requires the response is “at the top” if it is inlined or anything non-traditional stuff gets rejected. That tripped @MarcoZehe last time when he tried to …

and here

> [@Accessibility audit and shepherd for making improvements](https://meta.discourse.org/t/accessibility-audit-and-shepherd-for-making-improvements/66620/13):
>
> Hi I am the bloke from the LEDE and the OpenWRT forums. I am blind and use a screen reader called NVDA to access the internet. I will help out where I can but I don’t know much about html5 or what ever language Discourse is in, but I will try to explain how things effect me as a screen reader user. The thing I don’t like about Discourse the most is that I cant jump through the posts with my keyboard. To give you the best idea of how that would work for me I will have to compare the OpenWRT foru…

Perhaps we regressed recently? I want to understand what this “modal” is you are referring to.

(Also, did you try pressing ? to get the list of keyboard shortcuts? One thing I just noticed when investigating “how to get to admin area via keyboard” is that pressing = will get you to the hamburger menu but nothing in it is selected cc @sam – we should definitely fix that one.)

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