Discord and Accessibility

[mirrorofsmoke]

So. Discord, the wildly popular chat program isn't accessible for visually impaired persons. Not even the phone app is accessible.

People have put up requests for accessibility, but the devs call it a "quality of life"feature, and actually had the balls to suggest to a totally blind Mac user that he should just use Zoom instead of Voiceover. For those of you who don't know, Zoom is a program that greatly increases the size of text. So, it's the equivalent of telling a deaf person to just turn their computer volume up.

But, they say that if they can get enough upvotes, then they'll consider the feature. So, I'm going to share their idea, because I've been fighting with Discord all day because literally nothing is accessible beyond creating an account and changing a few user settings and all of us are frustrated.

So, if people would be so kind as to upvote this feature request or leave comments that say you think that an app which has a focus on community shouldn't segregate part of that community, we'd be mighty grateful.

Here is the request page.

And ysabetwordsmith could you share this as well? Better yet, if any of you want to share this, please do.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Wow, what a shitty thing. And what a gross way for the devs to respond. I mean, for peat's sake, Discord is text, you'd think it'd be the exact thing for access! *sigh*

[mirrorofsmoke]

IKR!

[lb_lee]

I mean, can't even IRC do that? If you're getting beaten by IRC, life's gotten BAD, man!

--Mori

[mirrorofsmoke]

The fucked up thing, guys? IRC is accessible. Literally, completely accessible. I can name you two clients, off the top of my head, for OSX that actually work!

[lb_lee]

Man. It's like the slogan of oldversion.com "Newer doesn't equal better."

--Rogan/Mori

[houseburning]

even better - it's text and VOICE. it has a built in voice chat. but no accessibility for visually impaired people to access the voice chat portion!

[lb_lee]

Whaaaaaat that's such bullshit.

--Mori/Rogan (Morogan?)

[mirrorofsmoke]

Reblogged. Thanks dudes.

-Cherri

[beasts_of_homeworld]

ughhhh discord, why you such failbuckets.

we want to upvote this SO MUCH but we can't access discord either - even just to sign up or sign in. guess discord don't want us to be able to register an opinion, huh? you can't even vote without signing up, which we can't do. way to silence the people you most need to hear from, discord. if you can't report the bug because of the bug, how will they find out about the bug? ...anyway.

hey discord - accessibility isn't a perk, it's a core design element. it's ESSENTIAL. good gods.

furthering the enforced isolation and segregation of disabled people for no reason is just utter bullshit.

love and hugs for all of you, and we're totally sharing this as soon as we have the spoons to write a post. <3 <3 <3

[mirrorofsmoke]

YES! This. Thank you! Also, thanks for the shares.

-Cherri

[lb_lee]

accessibility isn't a perk, it's a core design element. it's ESSENTIAL.

Yeah. I mean, if I can make my freakin' COMICS accessible, what's Discord's excuse? They should be mostly text anyway! Beh.

--Rogan

[houseburning]

wow that is really terrible! it didn't occur to me that you couldn't even upvote because they're not even accessible enough to make an account!

[houseburning]

upvoted it! it's unbelievable that that's not understood to be a necessary feature! make a tumblr post maybe and stick it in whatever tags the visually impared community uses and see if maybe spreading awareness can get the issue resolved? i'd reblog it

[mirrorofsmoke]

Oh hey. That's a great idea. I'll do that. Actually, lb_lee put up a post. I'll reblog them and add tags. And then you can reblog us.

[houseburning]

sweet

[lb_lee]

Here's the link to my tumblr post on it!

http://lb-lee.tumblr.com/post/159921673439/discords-inaccessible

Done!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have boosted the signal.

Also, what a dick move from Discord.

Re: Done!

[mirrorofsmoke]

Thank you! May all the universe bless you with amazing things.

Yes! Such a dick move! HOMG. They have a twitter too. I wonder if everyone shooting messages at their twitter would get something done.

Re: Done!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Possibly, but I suspect a more cohesive result could be gotten from a petition. Change.org is very good at that sort of thing. You could make a petition laying out the problem with the program, the company's obnoxious response, and what specifically needs to be done to fix that. Did they give you a threshold of upvotes at which they'll consider blind people actually matter? If so, use that to set the petition target. If not, guess and go for it anyway.

Re: Done!

[mirrorofsmoke]

I haven't talked to them. But I was having accessibility issues, so did the normal thing and googled to see if anybody else was. Turns out they are, so I posted.

Change.org is a great idea. Thanks for reminding me about it. I'll do that tomorrow and link it from DW when I get back from therapy.

-Cherri

Re: Done!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Ping me again when it's up, I'm on Change.org too.

Re: Done!

[mirrorofsmoke]

Hm. The one hang-up we're having is how we're going to deliver the petition to them? We've never done an online petition before. If you know how, drop us a line.

We haven't created it yet, as it isn't tomorrow but I just realized that I don't know how. Way to go, me. :D

-Cherri

Re: Done!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I don't know. I only use Change.org to sign petitions. But look around on their website -- they may have suggestions on what to do with finished petitions.

[vulpines]

I upvoted and left a comment on the request page. I hope they pull their heads out of their asses.

[mirrorofsmoke]

Thank you. So much <3

[vulpines]

I went to check the number of upvotes on that request page just now, and it's gone up from 111 yesterday when I voted, to 1,133!!!!! I wanted to let you know. :)

[mirrorofsmoke]

Holy fuckballs. That's amazing. That restores our faith in humanity!

-Cherri

[dreamwriteremmy]

Signed and signal boosted on Facebook, Twitter and Plurk (because a lot of the discord folks are roleplayers).

[mirrorofsmoke]

Thank you guys. <3

[cathugger]

Wow, I've been using Discord for a while and haven't heard anything about that until now. Went ahead and upvoted it, and I'll try to tell others about it soon!!

[mirrorofsmoke]

Thank you!

Also, your icon and your username are absolutely adorable. Fellow cat-lover here. :D

[jazzyjj]

Just discovered this entry earlier tonight, and have been reading it and the subsequent comments. As a VoiceOver user myself, I am not happy about this. I'm wondering if AppleVis knows about it. I vaguely recall this app being mentioned on AppleVis but I'll have to double-check. In addition I will link to your entry over at my journal. Shame on those devs for doing such a thing. Apple even has very good info on their site about making things accessible. I'm not a developer myself but have seen this info firsthand. I even watched a video that demonstrates how to make apps accessible, and the Apple employees conducting that particular workshop did a fabulous job. So in my books there's absolutely no excuse for this crap.

[mirrorofsmoke]

Hello! I went poking at Applevis with a stick, and I can't find a review for it. If you want to make them aware, feel free.

Also, thank you so much for the boost. It's appreciated.

Nope. Definitely not happy about this failure of Discord here either.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Sorry to bust in here. Btw, has discord gotten accessible for screenreaders in the 2+ years?

I've come to ask a question about where hashtag placement is best for accessibility? In line after the subject it's tagging, all of them gathered at the end of the whole post, something else?

This was a query that federation is having and trying to get input so best practices are normed before more people fill the ranks and it's harder to train.

[mirrorofsmoke]

Oh! Absolutely no apology needed! Feel free to bust in to ask accessibility questions or just to say hi any time. We're friendly.
We prefer our hashtags at the end of the post, Twitter style like this, assuming what I'm about to do works because I'm on a Braillenote which sometimes, due to the fact I'm typing in literary Braille instead of-puter Braille right now sometimes causes things to be misinterpreted when I type them. But here goes.
No. Discord is still inaccessible. 1335ssibilityfail, #whyyyyy!
See, I just answered your question and made an example of how we personally like our hashtags, all in the same sentence. If the number sign comes out as ble I apologize. I hope this helps!
comShuck

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Thanks for the input. hashtags at the end. check. and your intensifier mock tag came through fine, no pound abbreviation transpose.

I'll mention the discord problem, that's really catch 22 that you have to get access to lodge that you don't have access.

[mirrorofsmoke]

Actually, I may be wrong about the Discord thing. I just downloaded it to the Braillenote for experimentation sake, and it actually seems to have improved, but I don't have any people on there that I could toss a message at for accessiibility reasons and no idea of good servers to join. Do you yourself have Discord? If so, I could send you a message and see just how accessible it's gotten. Friend of ours says they don't think screen reader changes have been made, but I'm using a Braille display, so totally willing to test again!
comShuck and Cherri

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I don't have Discord, but I bet I could find you some people. Let me put up a call; I've got to afk but maybe you'll be able to check it out this week.

[mirrorofsmoke]

ETA, clinet not accessible. Browser version is accessible for DMS, at least. Not sure about servers yet, beyond knowing we can create our own, because we did.
Cherri

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

havocthecat is on Discord and is game for a test run tomorrow or Wednesday evening. Hope that gives you some intel.