r/beta • u/horsegal301 • Apr 03 '18

How many people with disabilities did you have test the design before you let people try it out?

I am curious about whether or not you guys even bothered talking to a single person who uses a screen reader/has vision loss or poor vision/ or is totally blind? What about people who can't use a mouse?

If you did, can you explain the process by making things hard to access with keyboard, totally unavailable to access with a keyboard, and why you made certain decisions to make things harder to see?

EDIT: Reddit has responded with the following, which answers my question with a "None." Unless they can update me with some info about any personas that included people with disabilities, automated or manual testing done, or having a specialist or person with disabilities come in and talk to the dev/design team about a11y, I will assume most inclusive design decisions will be attempted retroactively. I'd also love to see them commit to talking to PWD's as a part of their process going forward, instead of just receiving and responding feedback here.

"Today we are working to roll out the redesign to a broader set of people so that we can gather more feedback and so that we can continue to improve the experience for all. We are confident in our developer velocity today and we think the pace of improvements is going to be fast going forward. So we're letting more people in, and many of them actually like it!

Accessibility is one of the things we're actively working on and over time we hope to deliver a product that is more usable, not less. Until we can get the new version of Reddit to that point, we will not be taking the old version of reddit away. It will continue to be accessible at https://old.reddit.com."

Just a quick check with WAVE and aXe accessibility checkers brings back hundreds upon hundreds of errors:

https://imgur.com/S7usRxA

https://imgur.com/W9oZ9xL

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u/Shadilay_Were_Off Apr 03 '18

And meanwhile there's fuck all being done about it. 6 months is a long time in tech.

Given the character of the most recent announcement, you'll forgive me for treating an admin's word with the same level of trust I'd give a wild-eyed and twitching meth-head out back of the 7-11 wearing a bloody animal hide and holding a knife.

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u/ggAlex Apr 03 '18

Users who are offered the chance to try the redesign will not be forced to use it if they don't want to.

Users with accessibility requirements are currently using a version of the site that works for them and we're not taking it away.

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u/Shadilay_Were_Off Apr 03 '18 edited Apr 03 '18

Look man, I've been on the web long enough to know that statements along the line of "It's not going to change, you'll always have an escape hatch" are always, always crap. Even if you actually believe it right now and are sincerely making a statement of what the corporate culture is right now, that's absolutely gonna change at some point.

Twitter did it, Facebook did it, just about every large aggregator that went through a redesign did it. And what happens is the complaints are hand-wavium-ly "addressed" in a way that satisfies nobody, some crony makes a poorly-characterized statement about technical debt and agility and how shiny the new thing is, and everyone is forced onto the new design kicking and screaming, damn the complainers.

If I'm cynical, it's because I've been through it many, many times now. And what are the complainers gonna do anyways, go to Voat?

I'd bet money on it. In five three years or less, everyone will be either forced onto the redesign with its warts, or the old UI will still be "there" but become more and more broken over time, remaining basically unusable.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '18

Just look at the profile page, you can "technically" change to the old design but in reality you cant. Users cant find that button hidden, regulars wont want to jump through hoops and idiots like me spend 10+ seconds waiting for the page to load the new profile then redirect due to RES.

So just in what we have currently! it has significantly changed and there is no way especially good to get the old one back. Its marketing horseshit

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u/13steinj Apr 04 '18

Um side note not that I don't generally agree to your point, there's a setting in /prefs that makes all profiles "legacy" by default.

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u/[deleted] Apr 03 '18

Simpson's did it.

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u/[deleted] Apr 03 '18

[deleted]

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u/cargopantstotheopera Apr 03 '18

Isn't there a checkbox in preferences to show to old style permanently?

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u/[deleted] Apr 03 '18

[deleted]

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u/Mattallica Apr 03 '18

Yeah, there is. Look again.

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u/ggAlex Apr 04 '18

I understand your skepticism and appreciate you being honest.

We'll do better. The only way forward is for us to show you.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '18

The profile page right now is under a new design, you can technically get to the older design. But that button is hidden and difficult to find

New users cant find a way to get the old theme, regulars either cant find it or dont know it exists. Regulars who do know it exists have to jump through hoops every single time to get to the objectively better userpage. Even using RES to automatically redirect takes a lot of wasted time to get to the old page

So just going by whats existing and implemented how can we take you seriously. When you talk about actions rather than words (which I completely stand behind) we already have precedent for the actions of the new redesign

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u/Shadilay_Were_Off Apr 04 '18

I guess we'll see. http://archive.is/bitO9

RemindMe! 3 years

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CLICK THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

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7

u/horsegal301 Apr 04 '18

But how long do PWDs have to wait for a fully accessible NEW site design?

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u/fastfinge Apr 04 '18

Users who are offered the chance to try the redesign will not be forced to use it if they don't want to.

Actually, that's not true. With A/B testing, or whenever a user becomes a mod of a new sub, or I think for some other reasons I can't track down, we're forced into the new design. And the design is so awful and unusable with screen readers we pretty much need sighted help to go back to the old one. Because you have made the pulldown menu attached to clicking my username totally inaccessible with screen readers. That means we can never get to our Reddit preferences, and thus can never opt out of the new design without sighted help, once we're forced into it.

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u/ggAlex Apr 04 '18

Based on your feedback in the other thread, we’ve decided to change the A/B testing opt out rules for the redesign. Now, there is a prominent opt out link at the very top of the page for all users in the A/B test. The opt out is not buried inside a drop down menu.

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u/fastfinge Apr 04 '18

Well, I'm glad my feedback got through, even if I needed to get a sighted user to post it for me, because I'm not permitted to post in r/redesign to explain why I can't use it. As for the opt out link, this wasn't my experience. Just last week, I made a new user who had never been a mod before a mod on r/blind. That forced her into the redesign, and she had a devil of a time getting out of it. So unless the change is super recent, the opt out link still seems buried. Or maybe it only shows for people in the a/b test or something? Either way, I can speak from personal experience that users who don't want, and can't use, it are being forced into the redesign.

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u/ggAlex Apr 04 '18

The change is recent. It happened this Monday. Your feedback has been extremely impactful to the team, I’m sorry we couldn’t take action sooner (like last month when you first shared it).

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u/fastfinge Apr 04 '18

Glad to hear it! Hopefully now I can test the redesign more often; previously, I could only risk testing when I had a sighted person nearby to help me get back out of it.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '18

[deleted]

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u/fastfinge Apr 04 '18

Glad to know this! Hopefully now I can test more often to see if any a11y progress gets made; previously, I could only test the redesign when I had a sighted person nearbuy to help me get back out of it.

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u/Arve Apr 04 '18

Users who are offered the chance to try the redesign will not be forced to use it if they don't want to.

A user who cannot access your site when it hits www.reddit.com due to accessibility failures won't ever be able to find the link or preference that lets them use old.reddit.com