Accessibility Updates to Mod Tools: Part 1

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/14he7nz/accessibility_updates_to_mod_tools_part_1/

created by joyventure on 24/06/2023 at 00:14 UTC

0 upvotes, 33 top-level comments (showing 25)

TL;DR *We’re improving the accessibility of moderator features on iOS and Android by July 1.*

Hi mods,

I’m u/joyventure, Director of Product at Reddit focused on accessibility and the performance, stability and quality of our web, iOS and Android platforms. Today, I’m here to talk about improving the accessibility of our mod tools.

We are committed to making it easy for mods using assistive technology to moderate using Reddit’s iOS and Android apps. We’ve been talking with moderators who use assistive tech and/or moderate accessibility communities to hear their feedback and concerns about the tooling needs of mods and users.

Starting July 1, accessibility improvements will be coming to:

• How mods access Moderation tools (by July 1)
• ModQueue (view, action posts and comments, filter and sort content, add removal reasons, and bulk action items) (by July 1)
• ModMail (inbox, read, reply to messages, create new mail, private mod note) (by July 1)
• User Settings (manage mods, approved users, muted users, banned user) (by July 1)
• Community Settings (late July)
• Ban Evasion Settings (late July)
• Additional User Settings (late July)
• Remaining mod surfaces (August)

Thank you to all the mods who have taken the time to talk with us about accessibility and continue to share feedback, we’ll continue these regular discussions. Please let us know in the comments or reach out to r/modsupport modmail[1] if you would like to join these conversations.

1: https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fmodsupport

We will share more updates on our progress next Friday (and hopefully not at 5pm PT for all of our sakes). We wanted to get this update out to you as soon as possible - I’ll be here a little bit today to answer questions, and will follow up to answer more on Monday.

Comments

Comment by joyventure at 24/06/2023 at 01:28 UTC*

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

EDIT: Hi folks - I’m back to answer more of your questions for the next bit.

Hi folks - Thanks for the questions - I'm going to log off now. Please continue to leave your questions and comments and we’ll be back to chat more on Monday (6/26).

Comment by enfrozt at 24/06/2023 at 00:54 UTC

136 upvotes, 1 direct replies

TL;DR We’re improving the accessibility of moderator features on iOS and Android by July 1.

• *"We absolutely must ship what we said we would"**

It sounds like this is getting launched july 1st no matter what. I really hope it doesn't launch with a myriad of bugs that were deemed not critical enough so that the made up deadline for the stakeholders is satisfied.

Comment by GrumpyOldDan at 24/06/2023 at 00:17 UTC*

206 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Will Reddit be comitting to an accessibility standard?

Discord have comitted to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant this year[1]. Will Reddit make a similar commitment? If not to that level something similar? (Obviously the timescale may be different).

1: https://discord.com/accessibility

Whilst it's good to see a statement at last, considering how much has happened these last 2 weeks it would be good to see some actual commitment to a standard so we can measure Reddit against something.

'Improvements' are all well and good but going from terrible to bad is not adequate and it seems there's no clear goal to measure against.

Comment by adhesiveCheese at 24/06/2023 at 00:59 UTC

183 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So, just to be clear, moderators who depend on assistive tech will be losing access to Community Settings, Ban Evasion Settings, and Additional user settings for the better part of a month, and other mod surfaces for *over* a month (assuming you're able to keep your timeline)? And the next time we'll be updated on this is *less than 24 hours before they'll be temporarily losing access*? And all of this to keep to a timeline for revoking this access that is completely within the companies power to push back until you have these features in place natively?

Comment by [deleted] at 24/06/2023 at 00:21 UTC*

77 upvotes, 2 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by belisaurius at 24/06/2023 at 00:38 UTC

97 upvotes, 1 direct replies

We will share more updates on our progress next Friday (and hopefully not at 5pm PT for all of our sakes).

I hope it's being made clear to reddit internal management that the answer to structural failures to identify and mitigate consequences of business decisions **is not** developer crunch. The correct way to manage these kinds of things is to step back, reevaluate, and apply *normal sustainable development process* to the problem and push back implementation deadlines to meet that normal process. Otherwise, you are crafting something that is going to be inherently incompatible with your normal systems and will create long term maintenance headaches unless you duplicate this work later.

Comment by PotRoastPotato at 24/06/2023 at 06:23 UTC*

143 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Appreciate the efforts, all of the actual nonsense is above your pay grade, but everyone here reading this needs to know that even with this post, reddit is completely missing the boat.

• *A multibillion dollar corporation forcing disabled people (including the profoundly disabled) to simply "learn new tools", and to stop using the accessibility tools they're used to -- the tools they depend on -- to access/moderate the communities they depend on -- is cruel**.

Those accessibility tools blind and visually impaired folks use, per /r/Blind, overwhelmingly are mainstream third-party apps such as Apollo, RIF, Boost, Sync, etc. that reddit is killing.

• For the most profoundly disabled users*, June 30 will likely be the last day they will ever be able to access reddit communities that are important to them (let alone moderating them).

• *Creating new official tools is necessary but not sufficient... The existing tools disabled folks currently use and are accustomed to need to be preserved.**

Disabled people by definition have to accomplish the same tasks as the rest of us differently, and when they are able to do so, (speaking in reality here), they often do so with more difficulty than the rest of us.

Reddit is making the lives of disabled Redditors less rich, and more difficult. You've already killed off TranscribersOfReddit[1], the Wikipedia of accessibility. It's an absolutely amazing third-party project that fills in the unbelievable accessibility gap Reddit has where you don't even allow alternate text on images (for the blind/visually impaired) or audio (for the deaf).

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/comments/14ggf8k/the_future_of_transcribers_of_reddit

Reddit has done incalculable damage already, some half-baked "accessible" mod tools aren't going to fix it.

You need to cancel the API pricing changes, apologize to the community, **most of all to the disabled users reddit has clearly never really thought about until this month**, and go back to the drawing board for reasonable API pricing changes on a reasonable timeline.

I work in Cloud Computing for a living and at $12,000/5M requests(!!), you're charging about 100x more than what is reasonable. I just quoted a customer $0.80 (eighty cents) for 5 million Lambda calls on AWS so 100x more might possibly be an understatement.

Find a win-win pricing model for goodness sake, which would allow both Reddit and third-party apps to profit off your API.

Win-win pricing is right there, even to an outsider. It makes it clear you're looking neither for win-wins, nor are you seeking to be reasonable. The fact Reddit doesn't seem interested in reasonable API pricing, **especially given the accessibility issues that reddit decided to create for disabled users out of thin air**, is infuriating.

Comment by raicopk at 24/06/2023 at 01:13 UTC

63 upvotes, 2 direct replies

I asked this back when r/Redesign was in beta stage and I received no answer (probably too busy with the new CSS feature), so I will ask again now:

• *Will you ever include a native function to attach image transcriptions to images**, similar to what twitter has[1], **and link it to automoderator and/or other mod tools so we can enforce transcriptions on submissions if we wish to?**

1: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/add-image-descriptions

Comment by shhhhh_h at 24/06/2023 at 09:36 UTC

26 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Would have been nice to have all these available before you nuked third party apps.

My community is back online but none of the users are bothering to participate because they're angry at Reddit. Same for several of the niche communities I frequent. Giving us back some mod tools isn't going to fix that.

Comment by GodOfAtheism at 24/06/2023 at 16:00 UTC

28 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Starting July 1, accessibility improvements will be coming to...

1. Do the people making these accessibility improvements have any formal certifications (e.g. Web Accessibility Specialist[1]) in that regard or are they supervised or otherwise in consistent contact with someone who does?

2. Are they going to be making these improvements following the WCAG standards[2] or something else?

3. Why wasn't this already baked in from the start?

Comment by [deleted] at 24/06/2023 at 01:11 UTC

68 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by factorV at 24/06/2023 at 11:18 UTC

17 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Why are mods being forced into the redesign in order to have access to the few useful mod tools?

Comment by raicopk at 24/06/2023 at 01:10 UTC

30 upvotes, 1 direct replies

How mods access Moderation tools (by July 1)

Does this include reverting back to the previous ban dialog in mobile? Because the new one is objectively worse in many forms when it comes to moderation.

Just to name a couple:

• Issuing a temporal ban now requires extra steps (pressing `custom`, waiting for the new dialog to load and then entering the desired ban time) in opposition to the previous, straight-foward option for both permanent and temporal bans.

This is a huge problem when doing hundreds of repetitions, which leads to either wasting more moderators time for the sake of it (or you tell me which reason) or to an increased usage of permanent bans rather than temporal ones. Neither situation benefits anyone.

• The `include link` context option does not include a subreddit-level option to enable or disable it. It doesn't remember previous choices either.

Result? Both a downgrade on moderators experience and a less useful experience for the end-user, given that its display will often not correspond to the moderator's interpretation.

• The new placement of the comment preview on the top of the screen makes moderation memoristics outright impossible, eventhough they are key time-saving forms if one requires many repetitions.

Not only is the new placement deeply inadequate, since it has no standardized size (obviously depends on the length of the comment in question), but it also takes time to display which, then, automatically displaces the rest of forms down, making one misclick the desired form. Said preview should be on the bottom: not only is it the less important part of the dialog, but it is also the only way its irregular form does not interfere with moderation.

Comment by diarpiiiii at 24/06/2023 at 03:35 UTC

30 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Will it be as good as Apollo? Y’all should hire that guy

Comment by EdenFlorence at 24/06/2023 at 00:32 UTC

45 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So after many years of neglecting your own app, Reddit finally decided to implement some accessibility updates to the mod tools. And the date? July 1. Not a coincidence.

Comment by herbalhippie at 24/06/2023 at 00:55 UTC

15 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Modlog when?

Comment by Dragon_yum at 25/06/2023 at 19:35 UTC

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Wait, so you are giving accessibility tools to the mods and not the community they run? Who is in charge of your priority of tasks? No wonder the app looks like it does with a product like that.

Comment by stufff at 24/06/2023 at 00:26 UTC

37 upvotes, 1 direct replies

One of my subs makes extensive use of flair for various purposes and we haven't found a good way to automate it so a lot of modmail requests are users requesting certain flair. It's annoying that I can't change their flair right there from modmail and instead have to go to the subreddit, go to edit flair, and type their name in.

Also it's annoying that reddit lied to third party app developers about the timeline and pricing for API changes, and the resulting dumpster fire is the beginning of the end for reddit. But I know admins are pretending that isn't' true so I guess just the first thing.

Comment by [deleted] at 24/06/2023 at 00:21 UTC*

39 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by JamieIsReading at 24/06/2023 at 16:29 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Please give us access to the spam folder on mobile!

Comment by pfftYeahRight at 24/06/2023 at 22:58 UTC

6 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Could you just have the app actually load comments? How were all the third party apps faster than yours

Comment by anastarawneh at 24/06/2023 at 15:12 UTC

16 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Guys, this is even more of a reason to leave the site. It takes a scandal as big as this for them to implement very necessary features, when the very short timeline showed that they could have just as easily done this years ago. There are no more third party apps, there’s no reason for reddit to make any more improvements to their service after this point.

Comment by _BindersFullOfWomen_ at 24/06/2023 at 00:25 UTC

26 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Are y’all at least getting overtime?

Comment by auriem at 24/06/2023 at 20:06 UTC

9 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Too little, too late. Very disappointed in Reddit.

Comment by Artillect at 24/06/2023 at 21:39 UTC

9 upvotes, 0 direct replies

How do you expect me to believe you when the admins have been lying about improving the mod tools the entire decade I’ve been on this site?