Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind | Hacker News Reader

Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind

support.discord.com

50 pointsFabricio2093 comments

The language here rubs me the wrong way. Everything is stated as being "incredibly harmful" with no explanation beyond

> ...directly harms visually impaired individuals due to lack of visual clarity.

I am also not sure how "Elements lack unity" is related to the UI causing harm.

I don't use discord, so I have no idea how good the UI is. If the UI is bad and hard for the visually impaired to use, there is definitely a better way to communicate that.

This is how they end their post:

> This is not good UX design. It is the opposite. It harms end-users. Revert the changes.

The whole thing reads like a bad tumblr post.

A person who uses Discord posting on the Discord forum about how the changes (in their opinion) make the product worse to use is not exactly a good comparison to a "bad tumblr post", unless what makes it a bad tumblr post is that it's a downer or you feel it doesn't meet your quality bar for Good Forum Content.

By my reckoning, the post clearly enumerates their complaints with the new design, it provides some references that they believe support their argument, and suggests a remedy (revert the design). There is no cursing in it and it does not contain any personal attacks. It doesn't contain any conspiracy theories or memes or sarcasm or other markers you might associate with "bad posts".

It's kind of baffling that you are willing to decide that the poster is some sort of tumblr reject based on not liking how they argue their points when you haven't even used the product.

I think it’s the “harmful” rhetoric that signals “I have an agenda”. We really need to get passed this charged way of conveying perfectly valid feedback. Because come on. It’s a chat app.

Of course they have an agenda. Discord is harder for them to use now, and they want it fixed. When did "agenda" become a negatively charged concept that only bad actors possess?

Slack and Teams are chat apps too. Why would chat apps not be important?

Using emotionally charged language is usually pretty off-putting. Some people are used to using emotionally charged language any time they feel some way, but I think that ends up wearing people down for when they hear it in the future. That's probably why you have so many people here commenting about the use of "harm".

By “agenda” I meant it in the sense that this isn’t about accessibility as much as it is this person getting points for a call out.

That’s a bad faith interpretation. So not presenting that as irrefutable fact.

The language people use to express themselves is important; forming reasonable arguments is an important skill.

Falling back on strong emotional language like actively harms is a crutch - unless well-supported by facts or reasoning.

Also they don't "suggest" a remedy, they demand it, and their demand is backed by their unsupported claim of "actively harms".

> Also they don't "suggest" a remedy, they demand it

Would this post have been better if they said “it might be a good idea if you considered going back to the previous way?” I’m not sure how soft pedaling the ask makes it more reasonable.

The post is pretty clear in what is wrong and how to fix it. If anything Discord is the aggressor here with a forced change without an “use the old UI” button.

If the posts included screenshots to show how bad the UI change is that would have made it better. Maybe the support forum doesn’t allow it.

I think they just mean turn down the language.

> White mentions lack visual clarity and are incredibly harmful to individuals with visual impairment

"Incredibly Harmful" is hyperbole, and for instance could be rewritten as:

> White mentions lack visual clarity and are hard for individuals with visual impairment to read.

Otherwise what does harmful mean? Here are some examples of things that I perceive as incredibly harmful:

* Huffing glue

* Stabbing yourself

* Lead poisoning

Not being able to read a mention without highlighting it, or selecting a different theme, probably doesn't quite class on the same level as these things, even if it should be fixed.

Similarly, Catastrophic means "involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering" - which isn't meant literally, it's hyperbole, but the problem with hyperbole is that writing containing can come across overly exaggerated and emotional.

I guess one person's soft pedaling is another's common decency. But that doesn't get nearly as many clicks or views, or HN comments for that matter.

And seriously? "Aggressor"? It's not an attack, for god's sake.

If you need to use Discord to communicate and now you can't, that's kind of a big deal.

I take anyone claiming this at their word. But it doesn't make Discord an aggressor. That word has a specific meaning.

Isn't eye strain a form of harm?

It should rub you the wrong way because the language is wrong! The author has used the wrong word to describe the problem. If you replace the word harm and harmful with difficult it makes sense.

harmful:

of a kind likely to be damaging

difficult:

hard to deal with, manage, or overcome

I've done it for everyone:

>Saturated dark colors against dark backgrounds are hard to read and difficult to parse

>White mentions lack visual clarity and are incredibly difficult for individuals with visual impairment

>Color redesign lacks contrast and are difficult for individuals who are colorblind and/or visually impaired

>Elements lack unity

>Saturated, mid-value colors covering large fields are difficult for end-users

>Text contrast with new colors fail the WCAG test

For the visually impaired, it's not "difficult" to use, it's closer to "impossible" to use.

By toning back the language, you've made it sound like whining and not a legitimate concern. You make it easy to ignore.

"X elements are impossible for me to see because of Y condition" is a perfectly legitimate piece of feedback. "X element being the wrong color is causing catastrophic harm" is insane feedback. By using silly language, they are making themselves easy to ignore.

“Catastrophic harm” is a phrase you came up with. It’s fair to phrase accessibility concerns in terms of harm, because being denied access to something other people can use is a type of harm. “Catastrophic” is very common hyperbole for something you think is highly unfortunate.

first paragraph of the article:

>These are catastrophic design failures for the new UX, and directly harms both end-users due to eye-strain, and directly harms visually impaired individuals due to lack of visual clarity. It makes the app less accessible, and is not only visually displeasing, but actively ableist in nature.

Yes, what are we supposed to take from this quote as a reply in this context?

> Speaking of 0 evidence, I’d like to stick a [citation needed] on this:

> being denied access to something other people can use is a type of harm

What do you want a citation for? That being prevented from being an equal participant in society is negative?

I think it's easier to ignore when it comes across as typical internet flame war hysteria rather than someone trying to have a conversation about a issue

I'd like to think that, but this kind of rhetoric is becoming more and more common. People will utilize wild hyperbole, stretch the meaning of words, and declare that people are being harmed or oppressed as a call to action. I mean, at the end of the day this is about a user interface on a messaging app. But the post makes it sound like there is some willful negligence that borders on criminality.

But in a twisted way, maybe this kind of argument works. We are talking about it after-all.

It's on public feature request software it's already easy to ignore

By that logic, everyone should use caps and shout. Ad absurdum.

> The whole thing reads like a bad tumblr post.

It's exactly the kind of demonizing language that has unfortunately become common in recent years. By using dishonest wording to make your target look like an inhuman villain, it's easier to make the readers accept whatever the writer says. The writer then tries to sneakily shirk the responsibility to justify their claims. Just like at your quote:

> This is not good UX design. It is the opposite. It harms end-users. Revert the changes.

This wouldn't have passed my high school writing class. It's 3 arguments, 1 conclusion, and 0 evidence to support the conclusion. Instead of justifying their claims, people nowadays like to just throw out extreme words like "harm" and make it sound like Discord is installing keyloggers or something

For people like you and I, this is bad rhetoric - not well written or argued. But I feel like this is how the younger generations communicate and persuade with online messages. Be short, make bold claims, and make a call to action based on a sense of justice.

Speaking of 0 evidence, I’d like to stick a [citation needed] on this:

> It's exactly the kind of demonizing language that has unfortunately become common in recent years.

It reads like a thinly veiled “kids these days”.

This comment does the best job of explaining it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27118267

Writing like this is meant not to persuade, but to incite and coerce using emotion.

The question is, has it really become more common?

Sure. I don't really know what you're looking for in terms of citations, it's a general writing style. There's no database to query.

Personally, I see it all the time on Twitter, and more broadly online in left-of-center political discussions.

While in a general sense I agree with the excessively demonizing language all around, Discord is an inhuman villain in the world.

Well, if we’re just talking about unwanted opinions, then a sighted person tone policing a visually impaired user rubs me the wrong way. What if they use discord to keep in touch with their family and the product is unusable to them now? Why do you care how emphatically someone expresses how they cannot even properly see the product in question anymore? Imagine stepping into a car and the windshield is completely painted over. You need it to go somewhere. You would be irate! Do you need someone else telling you “you aren’t saying how, specifically, it affects you?” or “why don’t you ask nicely?” Have a little sympathy and the problem is clear. Discord doesn’t need your sympathy. They have an obligation - possibly even a legal obligation - to keep their products accessible to their end users.

I agree that Discord should maintain accessibility in their products, and I can sympathize with how frustrating it is when services you rely on break.

I think we are in agreement here - this post is an emotionally charged person venting. I don't have any problem with that, but maybe there is a better way to vent than on the discord support page. If you want to actually effect change, this is not the way to do it.

What you're doing is called tone policing and it's not helpful. Would the post have gotten as much attention if the poster had been meek and polite? Probably not.

people are allowed to have opinions on how other people express themselves. where does the policing come in, I don't understand

The policing comes in when the top comment criticizes how the poster presents themselves instead of addressing the content of the post.

Yeah, the phrase "cause harm" carries a lot of affect (e.g. urgency, impatience, panic, outrage, etc.). If we were to have a graph of common word usage and association, the words "cause harm" would be strongly linked with other phrases like

- morally repulsive

- life or death

- fix immediately

All of which is just one step away from the affect-saturated words like "hitler / mao / stalin", "genocide", etc.,

As such "cause harm" is one of those magical phrases in our common lexicon that has gained the power to turn an "is" to an "ought", and the author uses it as the logical glue to connect the relatively descriptive phrase of "This is not good UX design" to the proscription of "revert the changes"

But by using such an affect-laden phrase, the author is implicitly asking the reader to assign more weight to feelings (e.g. impatience, outrage, disgust, etc.,) and less weight to calculated executive thought.

This attempt through language to subvert the executive portion of our brain in favor of more primal processes makes me feel the whole article is suspect. After all, if the author's argument can be one that stands up to executive scrutiny, than what is the intention when the author attempts to by-pass executive scrutiny?

"actively" and "directly" really are the new "literally".

Seriously, what is it to be actively ableist as opposed to passively ableist? Are words just emotional signifiers now?

Exaggeration has become the bare minimum for getting your point across.

EDIT: don't get me started on "blatantly"

It's YouTube Face, except written.

It is disappointing to see that the comments here are dominated by tone policing and semantics. We ought to be able to look at the substance of the criticism and not get distracted by some of the word choices. The post makes several concrete claims in clear language that are worthy of discussion.

I use discord, I have a mild color anomaly in my vision, and have had problems reading low-contrast elements in the UI. Discord's update gives us a useful example of a major release that violates some dark mode design best practices.

Accusations of tone policing are themselves tone policing, so there's disappointment all around. How we use language is important to plenty of people; there's a reason OP is the top comment.

There are indeed discussion-worthy claims in the post, and they're discussed elsewhere in the comments. Why hijack the top comment to change the subject?

> It is disappointing to see that the comments here are dominated by tone policing and semantics.

I agree, but I'm afraid the argument that the post is making is not based on a logical series of steps. It doesn't follow the typical convention of observation, problem, evidence, conclusion. The post is substantially an emotional outpouring and a call to action. This changes the dialectics.

If you're going to create a central claim that is solely Pathos based, the tone and semantics of how you do so become the most important thing in your argument and, to your point, this is why this post comes off so _wrong_. The post author failed at convincing this audience in large part because of their tone and semantics.

Is "harmful" the best word here? I feel like inaccessible much better describes the issue at hand.

I think in this case the changes are making an existing situation worse, so by changing it Discord's design team is inflicting harm.

The product itself is not harmful, just inaccessible, but describing the changes as harmful seems right.

I have to use Discord every day for work, so if this redesign was interfering with that I'd be pissed. (I pay for a third-party Discord client for this and other reasons)

harm /härm/ noun : physical injury, especially that which is deliberately inflicted.

Nobody is inflicting any harm by choosing a bad color palette.

The word "harm" means many things. Just google "consumer harm", for example, and the top result is a government agency using the word harm to describe non-physical injury:

https://www.fdic.gov/resources/supervision-and-examinations/...

You’re conveniently skipping over the secondary definitions, which includes “actual or potential ill effect or danger”.

You're being a bit disingenuous here. Other definitions of harm include: "have an adverse effect on" and "actual or potential ill effects".

yea I was a bit taken back by multiple uses of "harmful" and then "catastrophic"

If Discord suddenly stopped working for me, while it wouldn't be catastrophic it would be quite bad. I use it as my main channel of communication with many contacts, and I use it for work. I have secondary contact channels for plenty of people (twitter, email, etc), but not all.

I can imagine a person having more of their life exist on Discord and if it suddenly became unusable for them due to these changes, it would be a catastrophe. Some people literally can't pay rent without Discord, since they use it to prepare content for work or to collaborate with their team.

That’s their fault, not discord’s. Apps existed before discord, and will exist after.

I don't want to diminish any significant impact it may have on its users, just remarking on the language feeling a bit intense. Hopefully they take the complaints seriously.

Harm now means 'negative to any extent'.

This is not an example of the definition of a word changing.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/harm

A second poster replies that elements are slightly harder to read.

I don't have terribly good eyes, but I'm happy to say I don't feel like I've suffured permanent eye damage from the discord UI :]

When OP says incredibly harmful and catastrophic I think they're just describing their feelings and how important it is to them.

Yeah, I was wondering that, too. UX can cause harm, for example, certain kinds of contrast and lights for folks with epilepsy, but I'm not sure that the complaint here rises to that level.

If you can't use something, you could argue that it causes "harm" to your well being or job prospects or something.

But I agree that "harmful" should probably stick to more significant, mostly physical effects.

But, of course, here we are on HN discussing it, so it had its desired effect...

Interesting concern for HN commenters to have given the number of "X Considered Harmful" articles that make it to the front page here.

I miss the times™ where theming was a thing in my favorite programs and environments.

WinAmp, MySpace, even my Nokia 6300 had themes. I never understood why this trend didn't stay and become more popular.

I imagine it's because it makes the app look amateurish.

There were really nice looking themes for the 6300 e.g. here: https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=6300%20theme

And WinAmp was kind of famous for its themes. If well done, they didn't look amateurish at all. Even better than the original.

But it's true that currently most UIs that don't look like all the others quickly seem half-baked.

Anyway, having even a little theme support in popular programs would fix issues like the posted one easily.

why does a discord full of 15 year olds need to look professional?

Because you want to appeal to all audiences and investors.

I doubt discord would have got influencers and musicians creating communities on it if it looked like xfire

mySpace did

I miss the times before applications had their own theming and just used bog-standard OS provided widgets that could be themed globally by the user. That this has fallen out of favor is, in my opinion, a good indication of how unprofessional and user-hostile our industry has become.

We didn't use to need bespoke "dark modes", you just changed the colors globally. We did this in the 90s, when 64MB of ram was huge. We have become pathetic.

Switching Windows to dark mode

And yet, Windows 98 let you have more control over its appearance than Windows 10 does.

Absolutely :) There was some official addition to 95 that was later integrated into 98 in a way... Don't remember its name.

Was it the Windows Plus! feature pack or was that 98 as well?

Microsoft Plus? It added an official theme engine, but even base Windows 95 allowed quite a bit of visual customization. Themes could change sounds, cursors, and icons, in addition to widget colors and fonts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MkYcUvkbYk

Everything nice and dark… except the web page content… at least back in the very early day before user style sheets and other workarounds became usable.

Theming makes it really hard to update the software in any substantial way. Even the slightest change to the design could end up breaking themes, or being drawn as white text on white background, etc.

I think it’s natural that it was more common when auto-updating software wasn’t the norm.

Hm that's a good point. Some access to the theming would be nice though.

Old themes were heavily based on tailored graphics that can really not be adapted easily. But the problem at hand (UI that's hard to read for the visually impaired) could be addressed with at least some access to the theming.

That's something many programs still offer though.

“Theming” for accessibility reasons is something I believe most systems support. Things like larger text size, high-contrast mode, etc.

It's doubly annoying when you consider that apps like Discord that leverage web tech have a very capable themeing system built in to them via CSS and the user styles web standard.

I guess I could've just opened discord, but I went looking for an example of what had changed: https://i.redd.it/l6sluq2o8hy61.png

Does anyone know which kind of websites and apps are required to implement accessibility?

I thought it was only government websites originally but then I looked it up and saw that it's a bit more than that. Is there a simple rule to know when I'm required to do this?

(I'm not looking for answers that say: you should always do it because it's a good thing to do. I want to know what the rules are.)

So, legally speaking, no website or app is _required_ by the Americans with Disabilites Act (ADA) to be made accessible. Title III of the ADA is the part that deals with public businesses and it doesn't mention digital services at all, but has been interpreted by various courts to include websites, there was a notable case against Dominos about this, wherein the judge ruled that Dominos did, in fact, have to make their online ordering tool fully accessible to people using screen readers, but this was the judge's understanding of the law and hasn't been challenged at a higher court. There's also section 508 of Title II of the ADA that does require government websites to be accessible, but it imposes no such requirements on private businesses. The DOJ apparently was considering a formal guidance on this a few years ago, but it never materialized.

Here's a quote from an article I'll link below, this article seems up to date with my knowledge of the matter and I think will help answer most of your questions. (Even if that answer is "lol, who knows"):

> ADA legislation as is applies to websites is currently a gray area. This often leaves the interpretation of the law up to the court where the lawsuit is filed, generally a state court. Suits have been filed in every state, though the majority of cases are in New York, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. > > Do all websites have to be ADA compliant? That depends. Courts generally reach one of the following conclusions: > > Yes, a business website is considered a “public accommodation” and must be accessible. > Yes, but only if the business also has a physical location that serves the public. > No, the ADA does not specifically address websites and therefore does not apply.

https://www.accessiblemetrics.com/blog/do-all-websites-have-...

So, the answer is that there are several good reasons to make your site and/or app accessible: You should do it because it's the right thing to do, it improves your ranking in google (a site that can be screen read can be mechanically crawled easier and is viewed favorably by Google's search algorithm), and there may come a day in the near future where it is mandated.

Honestly, I'd recommend reading through the WCAG standards sometime. It's a very well thought out document that lays out pretty straight forward approaches to making your digital content more accessible to users with a wide variety of disabilities. When people think 'accessibility' they often are only thinking about blind or vision impaired users, but there's so much more to it than that, and a lot of what you do as you build an app or site affects accessibility, whether you know it or not.

Dyslexic people have issues with some fonts, for instance, I don't think it's unreasonable to build your site in a way that lets the user override the font using their browser's settings. Or for people with limited motor control, placing frequently used together controls nearer to each other can improve both your UX and your accessibility for people with motor impairments.

I realize this isn't the easy, straightforward answer you wanted, but this is the reality of the situation.

Just realized I should have edited that first sentence to say "No _private_ website or app"

People have had serious complaints about the accessibility of Discord's UI for ages, disheartening to find out that they've made it worse as part of another redesign. I wish there was more of an incentive for companies to take this seriously.

Hard to forget the bit where they removed Light Mode as a "joke". Very funny until you remember that many people can't easily use Discord in Dark Mode (in part because of how poorly Dark Mode is designed for accessibility) so you're sabotaging their experience as a gag.

Yup, their contrast on a lot of elements is already way too low and this isn't helping. And light mode is honestly worse for accessibility on Discord because the vast majority of their base use dark mode and make choices for things that only work in dark mode. Like having a bright yellow for your username, it looks great against the dark grey background of dark mode, but is completely unreadable on the white background of light mode.

The color palette on their UX was terrible to begin with, new design or not.

Everyone's riding this dark mode train but it literally makes things worse sometimes when the colors don't contrast well.

What? They made the already bad UI worse? I complained about the total lack of contrast years ago. Who is the designer there? Shame on them.

Well, being a proprietary data hoarder, Discord itself is already harmful to all users - so at least they're consistent.

I understand the concerns here, but why is the goal to revert the changes? Discord's UI has relied on low contrast colors for a long time, especially for reacts and the code blocks. It feels like Discord was trying to improve accessibility not hurt it, and made poorly informed choices. Another tweak to the UI with these concerns in mind could be useful even for those without disabilities.

TBF their previous design isnt the pinnacle of readability either, it's basically 50 shades of grey (I use the web version only and haven't seen the new one yet). The audible beep seems to be always random. In general I think these chat interfaces are the worst kind of discussion boards we can have, but discord is free and still allows adult content so i guess its a compromise.

So, how it differs from current design?

Chinese language harms me too, i just cant understand it!!

So? I am color blind and could care less

No, you could not care less.[0]

[0]: https://youtu.be/B4wUsDozedE

I could care less.

https://xkcd.com/1576/

Fair enough!

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