11
votes
Website accessibility
Hi!
This isn't a topic I know a ton about (beyond basics like the need for image descriptions for screen readers), but @nil's layout bug stemming from a very large font got me thinking about accessibility.
Has accessibility been discussed and worked on so far?
(If not, I'd like to suggest taking a look at online accessibility guidelines to see what would apply to tildes in particular. It's one of those things that's easiest to add towards the beginning of projects, and it takes making a conscious decision to include it.)
One of the topics that springs to my mind is a colorblind friendly theme. I live on the solarized dark theme (because it's the easiest on my eyes), but even here I can tell easily that a person looking for a color-blind friendly theme would have a difficult time distinguishing between threads they did and didn't vote on (or click on). Blue and purple isn't really enough contrast for that sort of problem. Now I haven't done a lot of testing to see whether that's true on all the themes, but having one dedicated color-blind friendly theme would do fine there.
Colors are a big thing, yeah. I know there are different types of color blindness; maybe there are color combinations out there that work for all of them? (Some video games have a few different profiles for the different types, so that's also an option.)
Contrast is related, but also somewhat separate I believe (helpful for low vision, not just making sure colors are different enough for colorblind folks).
A high-contrast color scheme is not only helpful for color-blind people, it is also essential for people with strong myopia, cataract, atrophy of the optical nerve, and lots of other vision impairments. So, yes, +1 for a monochrome scheme, best white-on-black, because black-on-white can cause blur and strain the eyes, because you are basically looking into a lamp.
After poking around a bit more, I found a comment about accessibility on the HN article. That was great to see, and it answers my initial question~ But maybe this topic can be a place to brainstorm a bit. :)
Thanks for linking the comment. To expand on it a bit more, accessibility is definitely something that I'm trying to keep in mind, but I'm far from an expert on it, and am hoping that more knowledgeable people are able to help me out with finding things I'm doing wrong.
I know that some things I'm doing are good for accessibility - for example, I've tried fairly hard to use semantic HTML tags/structure as much as possible since a lot of accessibility tools rely on that for ways to navigate around more quickly. I've also tried to take advantage of new capabilities like CSS Grid so that I can rearrange items in the source order more freely, which should also help accessibility tools (by letting them avoid having to skip over unimportant elements all the time just because they're first in the source order).
I also know that some of the things I'm doing aren't good, and will need work. For example, I recently noticed that the buttons under comments (vote, reply, etc.) seem to be not keyboard-accessible (you can't tab to them). I'm not sure if accessibility software has a way of handling this better than a normal browser does, but it looks like the issue is related to them being
<a>tags without anhref=. I probably need to change them to<button>to ensure they're reachable with the keyboard.But even more than that, there are probably a lot of things that I'm doing wrong and don't even realize. That's where I'm really hoping to get the help of some others that understand accessibility way better than I do.
Thanks for taking the time to respond! I'm more familiar with making content/media accessible (alt text, captions, transcripts, html headings, colors), but it definitely sounds like you're working in the right direction. Hopefully there will be folks who can help with the more complicated aspects, like testing various screen readers.
You may have already come across it, but my favorite resource for accessibility is WebAIM.
(On the comment buttons: I'm also not sure if there's any software that handles it better, but even if screen readers can I think it's good to change-- not everyone tabbing around is necessarily going to be using accessibility software, such as folks with mobility disabilities who use keyboard navigation.)
I'm not an expert on a11y but I did write accessible software for low vision and blind kids for a while - the best way to understand how accessible it is without recruiting someone is to use the tools yourself. Test navigation using screen readers, with keyboard only, etc. Like someone else mentioned, high contrast and multiple color schemes are also great.