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Comment by JulianRaphael | Hacker News Reader

dang - are there any features for making HN more accessible? A vision-impaired colleague of mine wanted to check out HN today and made me aware that the contrasts on HN make it really hard for people with impaired vision to read on HN (webaim.org confirms this: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=919191&...). Using his screen reader (NVDA) didn't help much as the front page doesn't seem to take into account screen reading software. Has someone built a more accessible version of HN? Also, does the HN team plan to make HN more accessible in the future?

View on HN

It's a problem and yes we plan to fix it. I'm sorry it hasn't been fixed yet; we're just slow at things. Hopefully HN will be around for long enough to justify how slow we are.

That's great news and thanks for the swift reply. Have you considered asking the HN community for help with this issue? I'm sure there would be lots of volunteers.

I will when we actually get to work on it. Before that, it would be counterproductive—just having to process the inputs would cause further delay.

Markdown? Markdown-ish? Something better than the foot-gun of markup currently supported?

My wish list is not full Markdown support, but a little more than is currently implemented:

1. Ordered lists

- Unordered lists

Inline `code snippets`

Super^script

That's it. I totally get why HN wouldn't want tables, bold headers, etc. There's a danger of comments getting visually "noisy" with these. But for referencing code or mathematical concepts, or just listing things, the 4 things above would be really handy.

Yup... Lists, `inline`, and ```code``` would be fantastic. It's so annoying for n.yc to be literally the only place on the internet where you can type into a textbox but that textbox isn't some variation of markdown. (even facebook messages [on web] supports triple-ticks for code!)

> literally the only place on the internet

Haven't worked with forum software other than Discourse, have you? They all still use BBCode.

True, but it's such a mismatch in expectations where the entire tech industry has embraced markdown, but n.yc (tech mecca / water cooler) is most decidedly (and surprisingly) uses NotMarkdown(tm).

HN is an institution. The tech industry should be ashamed that they have HN modes.

I work at Vanilla Forums (we power some of the largest communities online).

I’ve worked a lot on our editors and content formatting pipelines. We support plaintext, markdown, HTML, BBCode, and a WYSIWYG editor with markdown shortcuts.

In reality is estimate the distribution is mostly the WYSIWYG editor nowadays for newer sites and BBCode for the older ones (some users on older entrenched communities really like their BBCode I guess).

You can do code blocks by putting two spaces in front of text:

  This is an example of a code block, if that’s what you meant.

Here's a memorable jingle for that handy new emergency number...

``` https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ ```

  </snark>

I find I can make unordered lists quite effectively

• like this

• using characters like

• U+2022 BULLET

‣ Or U+2023 TRIANGULAR BULLET

Similarly, you can do superˢᶜʳⁱᵖᵗ using Unicode as well (though I would only recommend it for numbers; Unicode doesn’t include all superscript letters, and most of the ones it does include look bad when used together). But yes, I agree that proper support for these things would be very good. (Especially code blocks!)

Yeah, I’ve done it before for superscript characters and even have used fixed width code points to force inline code. But it was cumbersome. (One time my whole comment was written in fixed width characters—I don’t remember why—and I found it a few hours later transliterated to the 0-127 range)

EDIT: Also, with native list support, you don’t get the wide line spacing. I like lists that aren’t paragraphs for each item.

I'm co-owner of a small Google Group for blind developers started on HN. The other co-owner is a blind developer.

Presumably, he's able to navigate HN since that's how we met.

I'm visually impaired but not blind. I have no problems navigating HN.

You are welcome to join the group and ask how other members navigate HN. Most of them joined via links found on HN.

https://groups.google.com/g/blind-dev-works

The fact that I can navigate HN does not mean that it is pleasurable. The front page makes cumbersome to navigate down the list of publications and the comments sections do not signal where a thread starts or ends and who is answering to whom. Skipping boring threads therefore becomes practically impossible unless I find the top comment and know the uncommunicated feature to collapse threads.

I've written an accessible skin for HN that's about 90% complete. It targets WCAG 2.0. I will post it here when it's released.

The text is mostly illegible, but there are LOTS of other issues too, tap target sizing for example.

Please email hn@ycombinator.com when you do post it!

> I've written an accessible skin for HN... The text is mostly illegible...

I guess everyone has to start somewhere? :P

(Greyed out comments are not a bug but a feature)

Perhaps, but not everyone may want to enable this particular feature…

You can turn it off by enabling “show dead”.

That will show dead comments, but near-dead ones are still grey.

In fact, dead ones are gray too, so you effectively increase the amount of gray comments ;)

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