The following is the text copied from the reddit post in the /r/blind sub reddit.
Moderators of r/blind—along with moderators in other communities who use assistive technologies and Reddit users with accessibility expertise—had a Zoom meeting with representatives at Reddit on Friday, June 16, 2023. While the call was promising in that Reddit invited us to be part of continuing dialog and demonstrated some well-conceived accessible designs for Reddit users, we came away with serious concerns which Reddit was either unable or unwilling to address during the meeting.
Reddit is currently prioritizing accessibility for users rather than for moderators, and representatives were unwilling to provide timelines by when Reddit’s moderation tools would be accessible for screen reader users. Further, Reddit representatives seemed unaware that blind moderators rely on third-party applications because Reddit’s moderation tools present significant accessibility challenges. They also seemed unaware that the apps which have so far received exemptions from API pricing do not have sufficient moderation functions. u/NTCarver0 explained that blind moderators will be unable to ensure safety for our communities—as well as for Reddit in general—without accessible moderation systems, and asked Reddit representatives how blind moderators were supposed to effectively moderate our communities without them. Reddit representatives deferred the question, stating they would have to take notes and get back with us. A fellow moderator, u/MostlyBlindGamer, also pointed out that blind moderators who are unable to effectively moderate the subreddit and thus will become inactive may be removed at Reddit’s discretion per policy, and that such removal would leave r/Blind with no blind moderators. Reddit representatives also deferred comment on this issue.
Reddit representatives refused to answer questions concerning the formal certifications, accreditations or qualifications of employees tasked with ensuring universal accessibility. These certifications demonstrate that a professional has the knowledge necessary to create universally-accessible software and/or documents. Because Reddit cannot confirm that employees tasked with universal accessibility hold appropriate certifications or that the company will provide for such training and certification, we have concerns that employees do not have the appropriate knowledge to effectively ensure access for all assistive technology users both at present and in the future. Reddit has also indicated there are not currently any employees who work full-time on accessibility. This is a necessity for any organization as large and influential as Reddit.
Reddit representatives had previously disclosed to r/Blind moderators that an accessibility audit had been performed by a third-party company, however they refused to answer questions as to what company performed the audit or how the audit was conducted. Answers to these questions would have allowed us to determine whether the audit was performed by an accredited organization known for credible and thorough work. Reddit also could not answer questions as to what assistive technologies, such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, dictation softwares, etc., were used during the audit. Bluntly, we cannot know the thoroughness or scope of the audit—and therefore the extent to which Reddit is aware of the accessibility barriers present in their website and apps—without this information.
During the previous meeting, Reddit representatives raised a question regarding perceived disparities between the accessibility of the iOS and Android apps, suggesting the audit did not confirm that the accessibility failings in the iOS app are much more severe than those present in the Android app. During the latest meeting, u/MostlyBlindGamer explained that the iOS app has no labels for the ubiquitous and essential upvote and downvote buttons while the Android app does. This question raises the concern that Reddit representatives may not have a full and actionable understanding of the issues at stake or, in fact, the exact accessibility failings in their apps.
Reddit representatives narrowly defined the scope of the latest meeting less than an hour ahead of it, explicitly excluding third-party apps and API pricing from the conversation. They did acknowledge that this made it difficult to adequately prepare for the meeting.
Reddit refused to define the term “accessibility-focused app,” alleging that this was outside the scope of the meeting. This term is not industry-standard and was instead created when Reddit carved out an exemption in their upcoming API policies for third-party apps used by blind people to access the platform. Without this definition, we are unable to ascertain whether apps that have not been approved but are nevertheless relied upon by community members qualify for an exemption.
Reddit gave no firm commitments as to when accessibility improvements would be rolled out to the website or apps. However, it is obvious that the Reddit website and apps will not be ready for disabled users—and especially moderators—by July 1.
In general, moderators of r/Blind who attended the call came away with mixed impressions. Reddit seems to be somewhat aware of the myriad accessibility barriers present in their applications and website, and the company appears to be laying the groundwork to fix issues which they are aware of. This is excellent news. However, we also feel that Reddit does not know what it does not know, and this lack of knowledge is exasperating, disheartening, and exhausting. We also came away frustrated that Reddit representatives were either unwilling or unable to answer prudent and pertinent questions which would allow us to determine not only how we can best keep our community safe and healthy, but also whether Reddit is truly prepared to commit to ensuring accessibility for all disabled users both now and in the future. Finally, we hope that our concerns—especially those pertaining to moderation—will be addressed expeditiously and satisfactorily, thus assuring that r/Blind can operate effectively well into the future. Despite our concerns, we remain open to continued dialog with Reddit in the hope that it will foster a more accessible platform.
What's accessibility like for Lemmy/kbin? I wonder if we could get an early start on accessibility with kbin, since it has a much younger codebase.
I was thinking that as well. /r/blind users just want a place they can talk and post threads that is accessible they owe no loyalty to reddit.
Kbin seems to be continually looking into updating things but I doubt accessibility / vision support is high on the priority list right now, the issues tracker is almost 300 long.
I wonder if we could find/contact/contract a developer with an accessibility focus. I'm planning on leaving some moderately significant donations in a few days (damn settling periods and bank holidays making that slow), and maybe there could be a community fundraising effort to get an accessibility expert in to submit some PRs. I made a big fuss out of accessibility on Reddit in the lead up to the protest, and it feels hypocritical of me to not keep pushing for it now. Not sure if Ernest would be interested in that or not, but it seems like it might be a good idea.
Some of the Devs whos apps that will be shutting down will probably be on board.
I think that would be great!
Not that it wouldn't be worthwhile anyway, but as a general thing, changes which greatly improve accessibility for some tend to be positive for everyone. I think that above post really demonstrates that. The /r/Blind users were using the same 3rd party apps as everyone else. Contrary to what reddit is trying to say, there are not particular "accessibility"-only apps. Like there's no daisy reddit. Being accessible was part of the general high quality, thoughtful design. And now they are being told to use the same low quality, shitty tools which nobody else wants to use, but they can't use. Accessibility goes hand in hand with quality. No news to you I'm sure.
I would be shocked (and sad) to learn if the devs here wouldn't appreciate PRs from a knowledgeable contributor along these lines. I think it could be hard to prioritize doing these things already because of how many bazillions of communications are coming in from people who are already using the platform. And if the main dev doesn't have expertise in this area it is also easier to apply oneself to the many problems you do know how to solve rather than going off on a research project.. (I have no idea about the skills of the kbin devs.)
Agreed, great idea. Maybe a code bounty for this?
Ernest says he's definitely interested in accessbility -- he replied when I originally posted "Don't tell people "it's easy", and six more things Kbin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon", which has a section on accessibility. But there are a heck of a lot of other priorities so boosting this would be very helpful.
Here's a post from @weirdwriter noting that kbin's fairly good for accessibility. but I know there are some problems -- here's a bug I filed last week.
@jdp23 I remember that, and it's still high on my priority list. In recent days, the instance has been growing so rapidly that I'm focused on keeping it running until the infrastructure is in place. That will happen very soon, and then I'll be able to focus on that and many other aspects that I had to postpone.
Thanks for all you do! I do devops shit for a living and I can't imagine what it's like to keep the lights on in a situation like this. I'm just really excited for what it feels like this place will become, as are so many others here.
@jdp23 Yes. Accessibility is a good start on KBin but more still needs to be done. Like, for example, I would wrap all comments to a post in a nested list item that is ordered so that way we can tell which comment is a hierarchy to another comment. I am also a little worried that others will submit code requests and additions that are not as successful as his original design, and then it’s approved, and then this one’s accessible thing is not as accessible anymore thanks to a third party contribution. Not saying that it will happen. I’m just worried because I’ve seen it happen previously
A valid concern -- and a good point on the nested list item!
One of the easiest things to do is honestly just to learn how to use something like VoiceOver and fix stuff that feels broken. Broke my wrist a while back and had to rely on Talon Voice for getting around my computer cause I couldn't type, was a huuuuuuge eye opener and made it much easier to write accessible software lol.
Mlem seem to have accessibility as an important focus from what I’ve gathered
I've never messed with web code before, but I am an experienced professional programmer and I think I can safely say that filing an issue that basically just reads "Kbin needs better accessibility for the blind" would not be particularly useful or welcome.
But what would be very useful indeed would be filing a long, detailed issue that starts with "Kbin needs better accessibility for the blind" and then goes on at great length with bullet-point lists and detailed paragraphs on exactly what it is that needs to change on Kbin to make it more accessible to the blind.
There's a great example right in the quoted article regarding Reddit's iOS app, for example - the upvote/downvote buttons there need to be labelled with alt text. A fully sighted developer might never think of something like that but it would likely be pretty trivial for them to fix.
So if there's any visually impaired users reading this, or users who have experience with making web pages accessible to the visually impaired, I bet that an hour or two of your time compiling a list of such things would be a great use of time.
Edit: Well, it looks like the issue that's basically just "Kbin needs better accessibility" was filed. There's plenty of room for comments to be added, though!
As a UX designer with a specialty in accessibility, I'd break up requirements even smaller. Accessibility is an ongoing process (like security,) not an achievement.
A dev can get pretty far just using Lighthouse to audit code, then running through with a free screen reader and with keyboard only. But accessibility can seem daunting if you try to make it one huge ticket.
The best way in my mind is to build basic accessibility testing into every ticket, the way you should do with security concerns, and then have a designer or QA run periodic audits to generate specific update tickets.
And much like security, you have to design accessibility into the app. It can't be a feature you implement later once everything else is in place. The fact that Ernest is taking this seriously from the start tells me that while he won't hit 100% of the targets 100% of the time, the notion that accessibility won't be a focus because there's bigger fish to fry doesn't quite ring true. If he's thinking about these things, he's going to be approaching requested features with the idea in mind that the new feature should work for people with accessibility needs first, and be pleasant to use for everyone second
Just for starters (knowing that they can be changed with themes) is color contrast
For example up top whether I have subscribed, all, etc selected isn’t clearly obvious.
I mean I can “tell” if I look really closely but there isn’t enough contrast.
There’s some great SASS tooling for identifying if the colors you have meet the recommended WCAG guidance for contrast/visibility.
Alt text and descriptions for items visual elements too.
While it’s hard to enforce across the fediverse I do like how I’ve seen some people post memes and write descriptive text of what is in the panels.
Here’s one I commented on.
https://beehaw.org/post/632458
Good lord I didn't realize how bad the app was. This is like... basic stuff I feel like lol.
Agree. Previous comment is too forgiving. No alt tags on essential interface items is sloppy as shit. No excuse.
Yep, this would be fantastic. Ditto goes for the apps. If anyone with experience developing accessible apps wants to help the Artemis dev, that would be awesome. I'm 100% backend, usually in Go or Python, so I don't have much to contribute personally :(
This is actually the core problem with accessibility in iOS apps. VoiceOver (the text-to-speech engine in iOS accessibility) automatically reads out the Title property of a button - which developers almost never set for image-based buttons because it's of no use to anything but VoiceOver. Instead VoiceOver reads out the name of the image file used for the button; if you're lucky the file name is "UPVOTE.png" and it sort of works, but more likely it's something like "RESOURCE007.jpg" and completely useless.
@AnonymousLlama He cares about accessibility, see https://kbin.social/m/kbin/p/425385/-/reply/857566
One nice thing is that because Kbin/Lemmy is federated, they can build an accessible platform and not worry about the powers that be flipping them the bird. There are good accessibility tools in the form of 3rd party apps for Reddit, but those are getting shut down.
That's an excellent point! Like, I still think that it would be great for kbin and Lemmy to be accessible (if they're not), but that's another benefit to federation that I hadn't considered.
Absolutely, the community that contributes to kbin/lemmy also want to help with the accessibility, unlike spez there's no monetary interest.
At least, I can/must add alternative text of image when I post the image to Kbin. Another fediverse tools also might be so.
I wonder if you could automatically reverse generate a description using AI.
Unlikely since many images include text.
On Reddit there was a massive volunteer effort of people writing transcriptions for images of tweets, etc.
Here is a free to use model: https://huggingface.co/Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-base Try the demo
I have no idea, but I have professional experience in the space and getting to accessibility standards (WCAG / ADA) compliance is hard for existing apps that didn't consider it out of the gate. That being said there's some low hanging fruit that is pretty easy to implement and hopefully some devs contributing have experience in that space.
Whelp, at least the upvote/downvote button on lemmy-ui has proper
aria-label.The android app, Jerboa has been working hard on accessibility since the spike of incoming users. Haven't tested it out personally but code wise it's looking very promising
The Mlem app for Lemmy has 100% a11y compliance in the upcoming release, so unlike Reddit we’re embracing accessibility from the start.
I'm so happy to hear this! If you're looking for a full-time IOS screen reader user to test, drop me a message. I'm happy to help out.
@Badabinski Both have accessibility patches and foundations that make them far more accessible than Reddit ever was but we need to ensure that foundation holds as more developers submit patches for both without accessibility awareness or care from outside developers.
There were issues filed by screen reader users at the Lemmy-UI github, and a lot of them have already been fixed with pull requests. However, the 0.7 releases don't have grate accessibility. rblind.com, a community created by the moderators of /r/blind is in open alpha, and is running development code directly from the github, in order to get our community the most accessible Lemmy we can, as quickly as we can. We recognize this is terrible devops practice, and we intend to move onto stable releases when possible. In the meantime, we're taking regular backups, and warning our community to expect frequent bugs and issues. We've chosen Lemmy for our community, largely because the documentation and support around deploying an instance was better. While we hope blind folks will be welcomed at all instances across the fediverse, no matter what software they're running, it's important to us to have a place where the former /r/blind community can keep together, and we can begin making custom changes to the themes to create the most accessible Lemmy possible. We will, of course, make all of these changes open, and contribute them to the main version of Lemmy. But running our own instance frees us from waiting for other instance owners to make changes for us, while still allowing us to post to any community on any instance.
That's badass, I'm really happy that's happening! As someone doing devops type stuff, you do what you have to. Running alpha code so you can test and continuously improve accessibility seems like a perfectly good thing to do to me, especially early on. I may or may not have deployed things into prod that were pre-alpha 😅 I hated it, but it solved a problem, and I had a shitton of alerts around that component.
Thanks again for responding. Any way I could throw a few bucks your way to help with server costs?
Thanks for the offer! But we are doing fine for now, and we are not comfortable asking anyone for money until we have demonstrated that we can build our Lemmy into a stable and accessible home for our community. Speaking personally, I’m a self taught hobby sysadmin learning as I go. Right now the focus is on leveling up our mod team; not only do we need to be good moderators, we also need to build digital infrastructure that our community can trust.
Hey it's not thatttt horrible, your just limit testing CI/CD :)
Is there any way a regular Joe like me, who is not a programmer, is not blind, can help in any way?
Honestly? Encourage people to describe images. Here, on Mastodon, wherever. Alt-text/image descriptions make a huge difference. Blind people don't want to just engage with other blind people. If we can normalize alt-text the way it has been on Mastodon in more places, that alone will be a giant accessibility win.