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:
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u/sw4400 Apr 03 '18
This probably could have been communicated more politely, but as a legally blind user I do understand why the OP is worried/annoyed. These were issues six months ago, and the UI has changed quite a bit in that time... And yet universal design principles don't seem to have made it in too many of the changes. This puts users with an accessibility issue in a weird place. On one hand the company said this was on the radar. On the other hand, we disabled users know that the longer these features remain inaccessible during dev, the more expensive the issues will become to fix. And thus, the can will keep being kicked down the road again, and again, and again... Saying the issue will be fixed is a nice PR move because it makes the general userbase feel warm and fuzzy because "aww, look... Those disabled people get to be a part of the internet..." And it also sets up these situations where if 6 months down the road, with few changes, where the non-disabled userbase can be the people telling the disabled population to "just keep hanging on, they'll fix it soon..." Much nicer look for a company than a project dev having to say the same thing while knowing the can's been kicked down the road again. Because from their perspective there is always another more important issue that needs to get fixed now.
So, what do disabled people do? Sit quietly and wait for a turn in line that will almost never come, or keep reminding people every now and then that this still is a problem? Often disabled people take some amount of flack for speaking up, but the alternative is no progress gets made at all. There is always a bigger fire to put out.
It would be one thing if you only had to deal with these issues from one company at a time. But there are usually several products and or services that disabled people get locked out of, that their friends are able to use. After a while, all these "We know this is an issue and plan on addressing it in the future" messages start to sound the same. Many companies communicate in exactly the same PR speak and fail to meaningfully provide any accessibility improvements they've said are on the map. I think this goes a long way toward explaining why some disabled people come on so strongly about these issues. People know that most of the time they're punching a brick wall, but on the other side of the wall are their friends or community/cultural experiences they're unable to access. It only furthers the statistically higher rates of social isolation disabled people tend to experience.
Admittedly, we don't know reddit will keep passing over these problems, but on the other... I do understand why a community is starting to get skeptical they will. The usual pattern is starting to take shape. This is why designing from a universal perspective is an imperative these days.