-30 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: An Improved Web Experience
Thanks for the a11y feedback – we really appreciate it. Want to make sure we understand exactly what you’re referring to in your comment so we’re looking at the same page and can give you the best reply! Can you share a screenshot?
Comment by SevereChocolate5647 at 25/03/2023 at 04:09 UTC*
22 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Thanks for the response. Sorry it took me some time, I wanted to compile and annotate some examples. This is by no means an exhaustive list of a11y issues.
While I appreciate the other commenter saying I should get paid, I'm very passionate about this subject, and was even before I found myself needing accommodations. So I'm going to freely give you a lot of information here... I also do presentations. *cough cough*
These first videos and screenshots are how I usually browse on mobile - not signed in, Chrome, iPhone 12 Pro set to dark mode at the OS level.
Two spots to note here. For the top, while technically this meets minimum font size requirements, I find it hard to touch the poster's name due to the small size and how close it is to the subreddit title. I often miss and hit the subreddit instead.
Second spot. The fact that all posts over a paragraph are partially hidden with a read more. I'm trying not to be overly negative in this reply, but by god is this absolutely obnoxious, and the implementation is not a11y-compliant. The button a) does not inform users of context ('read more' is not sufficient), b) does not inform users of what has happened after interaction, and c) disappears after click, making keyboard users lose focus.
I'm sure the content is truncated to make sure an ad is shown above the fold, but move it to the top or hell, put it in the middle of long posts if you have to, but stop with the hidden text. It's so difficult to do in an accessible way and beyond frustrating to have to click this on just about every post on a text-driven site.
Note that the home page is white while the comment page is dark. I don't have this issue if I log in. This also shows the titles wrapping to take up huge portions of the screen. Please bring back a more compact title, it's hard to read when it's broken up over so many lines.
The thumbnails are far too small to be useful, and it took me a long time to realize I could tap on them to view the image inline without visiting the page - nothing about them visually says that they're interactive. I love this feature, but it seems to have come at the expense at being able to do the same for texts posts that used to be on /.compact - please bring that feature back.
The text in the red box just barely misses AAA WCAG compliance with a 4.94:1 color contrast ratio, but tbh it feels so much harder to read despite passing AA requirements, probably due to size. This is a solid 'meets the letter but not the spirit' sort of compliance.
Also of note on this page is heading hierarchy is broken. The user's name is an h1, the individual post titles are h3, but there are no h2s in between. Headers must be nested in ascending order.
This screenshot is of the overlay, which despite being dismissed will appear several times a day. That's on top of the one at the top of the page and the undismissable footer CTA. That's a lot of precious vertical space being taken up with something violently orange and constantly attention grabbing. And not in the 'oh I'm going to click this' way but in the 'how do I add an extension to my mobile browser to customize CSS and remove this' way.
The start up I work for is struggling financially but even we aren't that visibly desperate with the CTAs. Yet.
I can inconsistently reproduce this issue where loading a subreddit will briefly flash the content, then show the loading screen, then the content again. Flashing content is very disorientating.
The tags pop in on a subreddit after some delay, moving a CTA. And we all know that CTAs that move right as you try to click them are among the greatest of front end web sins.
This clip shows what I see as I scroll through a post. Now that the upvotes have moved from the top of a comment to the bottom, the row of buttons at the bottom are wide enough now that I tap them as I scroll, causing them to light up, again being eye-catching and distracting. One of these days I'm afraid I'm going to start triggering the share function just trying to scroll down a page with my thumb.
I signed in on mobile to check the dark mode setting. Just visiting reddit.com and hitting preferences took me to this screen which is too wide to fit on my phone. I'm wondering if it has to do with the 'new.reddit.com' domain it suddenly switched to.
Lastly, while I don't have hard data on this yet, the new version is much slower than the old version. The fact that there's a bug with flicking content and the loading screen should tell you that much, but I'll get you some comparisons if you need.
This doesn't even get into the screenreader bugs, which while I don't use one personally, I know how to test with them. Just tabbing through a subreddit I get invisible tab stops with announced text and buttons without accessible labels. Oh boy, 'clickable button'? Let's play button roulette and see what it does!
I can provide a screenshare of that as well if you need... But I do hope that your devs know how to test with screenreaders, and they should be able to easily reproduce.
The questions I have for you are:
Comment by RonSpawnsonTP at 05/06/2023 at 01:46 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Did you review the very thorough feedback and accessibility tips that were shared in response to this thread? A "thank you" or "noted, we will review" goes a long way for someone that put so much effort into this.