Hacker News Reader

I would recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram’s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c

View on HN

Oof. Is there anything that could be done to make HN more accessible? Who do we call for this?

Wow. I don't know anything about screen readers or how blind people use the web, but I'm surprised that a strictly text website like HN would be inaccessible to blind people.

It uses table layouts and has no skip links.

Root, parent, prev and next are all skip links aren't they?

Or do you mean on the front page?

Curiously those are all aria-hidden.

Sina is great, it's a shame the device output is so much louder than his microphone in the video.

I didn't hear him mention the lack of skip links on HN's home page (skip links are more for sighted keyboard users than blind screen reader users like him), I did hear him mention that the stories on the home page are not headings. Yes, a screen reader can navigate link to link but there are ~7 non-story links between each story link so being able to navigate from story to story as headings would be really helpful and semantically accurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com