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They finally did it: Reddit made it impossible for blind Redditors to moderate their own sub

19 comments
  • Awful. All Spez ever did was call out developers like Christian Selig and froth about how they were making money off of him. But Apollo and other devs actually listened to their community and Apollo - for example - implemented and leveraged existing accessibility features because their product was so user focused. Reddit did nothing and have now shitcanned those apps without really caring how poor their own offering is.

    Just another example of how useless and greedy current Reddit leadership is, and how staying isn’t an option unless you are ok with Reddit taking the community for granted.

  • So, I was on an accessibility focused team, testing and cleaning up after the feature developers to make sure the whole product still met WCAG 2.0 to AA level. I can state with complete confidence that anyone without such a team will introduce unexpected accessibility breakage and regressions every single release, sometimes in completely untouched sections. For trivial tweaks. Screen readers are finicky, temperamental and moody beasts. Modern web toolkits do a fairly good job of being accessible out of the box, but like ChatGPT generated text, they require a bit of help sometimes.

    Would not be surprised if Reddit just wants to pay lip service to accessibility. That shit costs cubic money to do right, and slows the roll of releases. Unfortunately, most advertisers on a social platform couldn't care less.

    • Ah! Someone who understands!! You know what really drives me up the wall? Heading misuse! Oh yeah, let's just put this h4 at the top of the page before anything else. Who cares about hierarchy, anyway? It's not like anyone uses these things, right?

      Oh, and not just heading misuse, but how about the total lack of an h1! And the name of the site is...null! Like, how can you miss that?? JFC, even google.com doesn't have a frickin h1! Aarrgh why

  • The whole Reddit issue aside, my understanding is that it's also the case that kbin and lemmy are not really at the point where the blind can readily use and moderate the systems. I would wager that they will get there, but I think that it would be more-effective to criticize Reddit after the Fediverse is doing what Reddit is not.

    Also make for better stories for the media.

    • I would say there's a large difference between a corporation actively removing accessibility options a community has come to rely on, and an open source community project that is building to have all the features needed to host everyone comfortably. We don't need to criticize reddit in the context of its alternatives, because we can validly compare it to reddit in May.

19 comments