The Forgotten Forum Consideration – Accessibility

[Ash]

Previously if you had asked me about accessibility, I would have told you that I had no idea what you were talking about. Three years later, with personal experience as an accessibility consultant, here I am getting ready to discuss how accessibility has been completely forgotten about in the world of forums. What is Web Accessibility? It’s ensuring that the websites, tools, and other technological services that we offer have been designed and developed with people with disabilities in mind. There are so many different user needs that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. But there are a lot of simple...



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[Ravenfreak]

I think a lot of us forget that there are potential members out there that have visual impairments and they might not be able to easily browse our communities. I know of at least one member on Sonic Retro who has slowly been going blind and relies on a screen reader to browse and post on the forum.

 

[Arantor]

It is important to actually engage with people in this space, though, rather than guessing what you think might help - instead finding out what actually helps (or work with them to try things that help). It's important not to be just making changes blindly and claiming you're 'more accessible' without some actual investigation into whether that's actually true or not.

 

[Cory]

I recently stumbled upon a cool widget you can add to your site for better accessibility. I figured this would be the best place to share it.

 

[Arantor]

Assuming you’re happy with all the content on your site explicitly being given to train AI on, yes.

 

[kolakube]

Great article and an important reminder. Accessibility is something I am becoming more aware of in my own development practices and have lots to improve upon.

This brings back why truly understanding the basics of how websites are built at the HTML level is so important and how many inherent benefits come from doing things as right as possible.

A mind-bending rabbit hole I recently went down is how difficult it is to actually get helpful alt text for user avatars.

In nearly all cases you will just see <img src="..." alt="Avatar image for {username}" />, but that is not descriptive of what's in the actual image and can be repetitive if announced by a screen reader next to the author's username, which is pretty common (see any forum post).

The solution is to give user's an option to enter their own descriptive text, but that opens a whole other UX can of worms and will be simply ignored in most cases. I love the idea of AI to help out here to fill out the blanks, and AI for accessibility in general has been one of my favorite use cases for this new technology.