Discourse with a screen reader

[Osama]

@nolan

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?

@nolan

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.

Last week I used Discourse with a screen reader (NVDA) for a day and this problem was my #1 frustration, so I very much want to fix it.

When you enter a topic from a topics list like /latest, Discourse scrolls you down to and highlights the first unread post in the topic or to the last post if there are no unread posts. This works great for sighted users, however screen reader users are not made aware of this because the focus is not moved at all when you enter a topic so screen readers will just start reading from the top of the page.

I’ve deployed a theme component here on Meta to test my fix for this problem. Can anyone that uses a screen reader test the fix and see it it makes things better (or worse ) please? Enter a random topic, read a few posts, leave the topic and enter it again, can you easily tell that Discourse put you at the first unread post? Any improvements we can make?