sentence 2 “I’d like to give a huge thanks to the people in this thread. I help admin a couple of discourse instances and have noticed most of the things mentioned here.”
enter
quoted block is added
I like this mechanics, but it is a very big job to build. Luckily we can build it in a component so we can experiment first. Adding it to the list of projects we have to experiment with. Fair warning it may take a while to get to it, but I agree it would be fantastic.
That sounds like a reasonable way to do it if you can’t adapt the existing workflow that’s used by people using a mouse. I prefer staying as close to one workflow as possible but since i’m not sure how it’s done currently i can’t really make suggestions based on the workflow used by sighted people.
An alternate suggestion that might be lighter than what @sam suggested might be to have a keyboard shortcut like alt shift q for example that would check for selected text and insert the quote info of the text that’s selected into the currently open editor?
If done this way the user would find the text to quote, select it, and hit the keyboard shortcut.
This seems like a lighter workflow, but maybe i’m missing something that would make this impossible.
Thoughts?
If I wanted to quote a post I think I would just use the quote entire post and edit the text out I did not need.
@ mentions I suppose can be made to work but not knowing how it does work visually makes it harder to come up with suggestions. From time to time this has worked on facebook mobile site but you never know with that site what is broken one day is maybe not the next.
But if I type @XXX XXX being part of the username you could be alerted that there are matches and maybe use tab to get into the list of suggested names. Something along that line with a way to select and close suggested names should be possible.
Another minor irritation is that I am often unsure who I am replying to in a long discussion, since the reply button just notifies me that I am replying to a post. as I currently use my forums I see no way of finding out or reading the post I am replying to without quoting it, witch I often would not want to do anyway.
Currently the reply button has the aria-label of “Reply”. How do you feel about changing it to “Reply to post #4 by Sam”. Makes you feel far more anchored prior to posting.
I see the “or presss ctrl+enter on the send button” and when I remember to do that while in the editor it does actually work so not anything I would change there.
Claus in the
As you can see, that works, and reasonably well.
However, as you also pointed out, it doesn’t work very well if you want to snip partial replies from multiple posts.
So i’m still wondering if my method wouldn’t work. Another thing i’m thinking about now when writing this is i’d like to quote myself from my last post, but have no way to do so because i’m not replying to that post.
That is for sure not the way to do this. Since the text you propose is read out when the button has focus you do not need to hear the shortcut key control+enter before the function of the button reply to the post.
You want the or use control+enter last since you can ignore it and just press send if focus is on t the button, and next time if you re remember use the shortcut key instead of using the button to reply.
Claus
Another enhancement request since this is more nice to have.
In a thread like this one, when you want to like or reply to a post the options are presented in the following order.
Try using the tab key and hope that there is no mentions or links or quoted messages in t the post you are viewing:
the tab key will land on:
“X like this post”
“like this post”
“share a link to this post”
“show more”
“start writing a reply to this post”
As a user you most likely either want to like the post or reply so these 2 buttons should be the first in the tab order, reply should not be the last button you land on.
Also it is the “start writing a reply” button where I suggest to change the text to reply to “XX” where XX is the username of the person that wrote the post you are going to reply to.
If the texts for the buttons is not correct it is because I translate from Danish.
Claus
Some new observations or not new since these issues have been mentioned by others:
Accidentally I was pointed to the blog topic for new users with hints for using discourse.
Here it is obvious that the way you are expected to move to last read post in a topic or go to the top or the end of the thread does not work with a screen reader. Tested mostly with jaws but also with nvda, it is unclear where the focus is moved to but it is not as described here at all:
“Selecting a title from the topic list will always take you to your last read post in the topic. To enter at the top or bottom instead, select the reply count or last reply date.”
If read/unread is indicated by colour good accesibility would mean you have to add read or unread to the topic/post heading but importanly as the last piece of information so it can be cut off if the user does not need it.
And while reading the news for 2.8 beta 3 this seems interestting but I am not sure I am notified about it by the screen reader:
“Add last visit indication to topic view page
When opening a topic you have already started reading, Discourse will automatically load the topic at the first unread post so you can keep reading. Now, Discourse also displays an indicator of where your last visit was, so you can safely scroll up or down without losing your place.”
Another issue, when uploading a picture as described in the editor just dragging a picture into the edit field, I see no way of adding an alt text to my picture. It may be there hidden somewhere and I did not spend much time looking for it, but meaningful pictures that cannot be described in a simple way with an alt text is a very basic accessibility problem.
Claus
I have discovered that at least from 2.8 beta 6 changes have been made to the dropdown box where you can set notification for a post. Some of these changes are good some not so good. With the new implementation the dropdown box is accessible when you use tab to go through the controls, however there is nno text describing the control and you cannot use the more a advanced naivgation techniques used in most screen reader s to find a certain type of control. This control will be hard to find unless you tab to it using the tabulator key. And what you will here is not the name, or type of control only the selected state, following, silent or normal. You will pprobably have to add some aria code to the control so it is exposed as a dropdown box to the screen reader and add the old short description.
Claus
We used application as other roles were causing issues, but we are considering changing to listbox, I’m not exactly sure what you are suggesting with 2.6 as it talks of role but nothing specific.