Comment by eksith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eksith | Hacker News Reader

The bigger question, I hope someone will answer is : Why Discourse?

Not putting down the software, but I did look at the about page and didn't get much convincing. Also, even though I'm not mainly a PHP dev, the assertion that "ancient, legacy PHP/MySQL code bases" doesn't apply to bbPress or Vanilla (or at least I hope not, I haven't really looked at the code in a while).

Also, and this may be what sells it to me, can I use it comfortably if I'm disabled? I've built some discussion forums for sites that cater to people who have difficulty navigating cluttered environments (some have suffered strokes or other brain injuries) and some who are legally blind. Can they replace their forums with Discourse?

Other forums, even the crappy legacy code ones, still have real HTML links that can be browsed. Can I use it while having JS disabled (let's say I'm some privacy freak)?

Edit: Should have read the FAQ first ;) So my Lynx and text-to-speech users are out of luck.

> can I use it comfortably if I'm disabled?

tomdale posted a link in a comment above, but yes, you can. I wrote about using Discourse with screenreaders here: http://words.steveklabnik.com/emberjs-and-accessibility

Accessing content and having a voice are not the same. As sams99 points out, some users still won't be able to communicate without JS.

Yes, some users that choose to turn of JavaScript or that use old screen reader software that works with JavaScript.

My point is that (at least) anyone with a computer running OS X has a screen reader that works just fine with JavaScript heavy sites.

You get a very basic view with non js, which gives you most of the information but does not allow you to contribute anything to the sites. This is mainly done for search engines.

If you ever feel like it, I would love your perspective on another related project I am working on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5200340.

I find that it is really hard to put myself in the shoes on someone who relies on accessibility tools to brows with. I do all kinds of things for accessibility, but there is no good equivalent of unit testing or continuous integration for accessibility that I know of. Maybe that’s a start-up waiting to be created. :)

Any good books on the subject? I already use ARIA attributes, which I didn’t know about at all until very recently, and there could be more people like I and the Discourse guys would benefit from reading up on.

Vanilla and bbPress are both pretty typical PHP forum software (read: bad)

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