Is Discourse AA compliant?

[Nina_11 (Nina)]

Hi - I see there’s a lot of work that Discourse has put in for accessibility. Does anyone know if Discourse is AA compliant?

[Heather_Dudley]

I’ve had a few complaints about accessibility on my forum. On mine, sometimes our vision-impaired users complain their VoiceOver and screen reader technology doesn’t cooperate well.

Some examples:

Another issue I’ve noted: The VoiceOver screen reader (and probably other screen readers) don’t follow changes in focus due to the keyboard shortcuts. For example, hitting the = key opens the hamburger menu, but VoiceOver focus doesn’t jump to that menu.

Another:

While this seems like an issue for any user, it’s especially painful for the vision impaired with VoiceOver screen reader enabled, as we frequently use Command+Up/Down Arrow to not just move to the top/bottom of a page but also bring focus to the first/last readable HTML element. It’s especially useful for quickly jumping to the top banner from any point on any web page.

We’ve also had some complaints from our neurodivergent users about infinite scrolling.

[Nina_11 (Nina)]

Ah thanks! So I do mean AA compliant but not Alcoholics Anonymous compliant!

I’m talking about AA compliant that is a part of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

I’d say we’re pretty close, but we’re not completely compliant at this time. It’s definitely possible that we’ll be compliant within the next year.