Okay, earlier today, I accidentally deleted my browser cookies that I usually keep when cleaning out my cookies, and when I logged back into this forum, I found the HtML headings on individual thread titles on the latest threads page are no longer there, making it impossible for me to navigate the forum efficiently with my screen reader.
I don’t know if the deleted cookies is related to the lost of html headings, but since they happened at the same time, it make me wonder if there is some display setting for the forum that is saved in the cookie and not my account and I have no clue how to fix things if that is the case.
Any help would be appreciated.
Also, sorry if this is in the wrong place, I rarely create new threads on any forum I frequent and thread creation is another way Discourse is almost completely unlike other forum software.
I think this post might’ve gotten a little buried under the IFComp stuff. I’m no expert on how Discourse works, but I checked the Latest topics page just now.
It looks like the page has no actual HTML heading elements for the title of each thread. Instead, the title of each thread is a link inside a span element. The span element has an HTML role of heading and an aria-level of 2. I think that means the span should behave like a level 2 heading to a screen reader, so I’m not sure why it’s not showing up as a heading.
The exact HTML I’m seeing is: <span class="link-top-line" role="heading" aria-level="2">
I wonder if the theme has something to do with it? If you go to your profile, then Preferences, then Interface (easy interface link), there are some display settings you can change… but since they’re tied to your actual Discourse account, I don’t think they should have anything to do with local cookies.
Maybe the forum mods could help with this? @moderators
I’d be interested to know why Discourse uses an aria role for a heading when screen readers understand regular old heading html tags anyway. ARIA is a great thing but only when you use it wisely.
I did a search and from what I can glean the first quick thing to try is clearing cache but not cookies so it doesn’t ask you to log in again, and that may possibly restore some things.
I’ll be honest, spans and area roles are beyond my level of HTML/CSS knowledge… Though now that I think of it, there was an update to Firefox that changed the main number recently… I forget the exact timing on that, but maybe it tweak how spans are handled.
That said, I’ve found a workaround. There are way too many links on the latest posts page for tabbing or my screen reader’s k for links navigational hotkey to be pratical, but using g to jump between graphics, about half the graphics on the latest page have a user’s screen name as alt text and the other half have alt text that seems related to tags(information is hte most common, but puzzle and traffic light show up as well)… If I jump to a graphic with a user screen name as alt-text, the link right after it is a thread title link.
I don’t use a screenreader (I have the opposite disablity…) but this site does have a “screenreader” theme in the interface settings, as well as a checkbox to make the theme the default across all of your devices, implying that if you don’t check that, your theme choice would be stored in your cookies. I wonder if that might be the problem? (I don’t notice a difference in the html page structure with that theme selected, though.)
I know the “screenreader” theme was created when we switched to Discourse and most of us are not really sure what the differences might be. I’m not sure how it got created.
I don’t know if this is any help at all but there is a simplified “reader mode” users can toggle when reading posts. It strips out a lot of avatars and other clutter for ease of reading, but I’m unsure if that might help anything with screen readers. All the other hidden tags may still exist but be hidden.
This view can be accessed by clicking the “reader mode” icon to the right of the message flow. Unfortunately this does not have a keyboard shortcut.
Another potential option that may or may not help with screen readers - if you want to strip away the forum UI entirely, you can use your browser’s native reader view shortcuts:
Safari:Cmd + Shift + R (Mac)
Firefox:F9 or Cmd + Alt + R / Ctrl + Alt + R
Edge:F9
Chrome: Does not feature a simple direct shortcut by default, but you can navigate via F6 then Tab.
Yeah, so instead of needing things to be read to me, I have to announce myself to others or they won’t know where I am. (I’m actually hard of hearing, which I suppose isn’t technically the opposite, but the accommodations for it are.)
I made the screen reader theme when we first migrated, I think to work around a single issue people had reported. I don’t know if the work around is still needed or if it even works now!
I knew I wasn’t the token blind person on this forum, but I wasn’t aware we had any deaf folk around here.
Also, I can now confirm that it seems to be a Firefox issue as I just installed Chromium and copied the url for the latest posts page from one browser to the other and the headings in those spans are still being recognized in Chromium. Hopefully either a Firefox update or the next Orca release(I’m on the Orca mailing list, and it seems like half the posts there are apps making changes that break their screen reader compatibility in some way and then the Orca dev patching a work around into Orca).
Right, I have figured out the problem. The headings go away only if the browser window is minimised. So check to see if it’s maximised with windows+up arrow. @Mewtamer
