I lost the video a while back, then finally re-found it. Here's a blind person showing how Hacker News sounds over JAWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c&t=386s

(Headphone warning: the volume is unfortunately all over the place, the screen reader is way too loud and the speaker volume is way too soft.)

TL;DR, the page design places so much emphasis on visual table layout that it doesn't incorporate a single <h1> or <h2> anywhere, and it is effectively impossible to read the site rapidly without unconditionally listening to all the

Hacker News. Page has 224 links. Hacker News visited Unlabeled graphic Graphic y18 link Hacker News link new vertical bar link past vertical bar link comments vertical bar link ask vertical bar link show vertical bar link jobs vertical bar link submit. link login

at the top of every single page.

I just got mad and got JAWS working in demo/evaluation mode. Here's what blind users hear every time they visit HN:

Table with 3 columns and 61 rows. 1. link upvote link Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane left paren link nature.com right paren 115 points by link jnord link 1 hour ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 46 comments. 2. link upvote link Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition link vinepair.com right paren 131 points by link harambae link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 42 comments. 3. link upvote link SoftBank’s Sale of Arm to Nvidia Collapses, Arm to IPO left paren link reuters.com right paren 126 points by link gaius_baltar link 4 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 24 comments. 4. link upvote link You can change your number left paren link signal.org right paren 508 points by link feross link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 300 comments. 5. link upvote link Finding the average of two unsigned integers without overflow left paren link microsoft.com right paren 249 points by link mlex link 8 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 119 comments. 6. link upvote link IRS to ditch biometric requirement for online access left paren link krebsonsecurity.com right paren 328 points by link bonyt link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 112 comments. 7. link upvote link KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE left paren link complete.org right paren 167 points by link jrepinc link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 65 comments. 8. link upvote link Some mistakes Rust doesn’t catch left paren link fasterthanli.me right paren 118 points by link jacobwg link 6 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 17 comments. 9. link upvote link Flexbox Froggy – A game for learning CSS flexbox left paren link flexboxfroggy.com right paren 210 points by link mrzool link 9 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 21 comments. 10. link upvote link Ask HN: How to raise funds for rare disease research? 204 points by link halukakin link 10 hours ago vertical bar link hide vertical bar link 127 comments.

That doesn't sound too bad, but as outlined (somewhat) in the video above, blind users typically don't go for walls of text like the above, they typically navigate interactively by virtually zooming "in" and "out" of the navigation hierarchy in a document.

This does not work with sites that do not have any headings - and HN has none.

You'd better not be blind and have ADHD! Not only do you have to listen to all the navigation cruft, you have to listen to the entire front page as a well of text and lean on working memory, because the lack of headings makes it nontrivial to pause/rewind.

Now, 75%+ of the material linked here can be expected to have a minimal level of reasonable common sense with regards to semantically-structured layout, so once you've left the link and title soup you can probably expect to listen to some proportion of articles and information in relative peace.

But hang on... what if you come to the site for the comments?

DUN DUN DUN

All I can say is... hopefully you don't have ADD either. Here's a portion of this thread as a blind user would hear it:

link left bracket dash right bracket I have to assume the reason that it hasn’t been done is HN doesn’t consider it a problem, from my viewpoint I just followed and I can see there are definitely a few flags I did not intentionally do. I have two pages of flags, I would say approximately a page worth is misflags. on edit: I don’t seem to have any misvouches so not sure why misflags would happen and not misvouches. link reply link upvote link benrbray link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket HN is one of the best designed websites I use daily. The information density is unmatched on the "modern" web. link reply link upvote link alksjdalkj link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket So are you refuting the assertion that HN does a poor job with accessibility? Or just saying that you don’t care because it works well for you? link reply link upvote link DoreenMichele link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket I love HN and it works well for me, even on mobile and I’m seriously handicapped, including visually impaired. It’s also got known accessibility issues, including for people who are blind or otherwise more visually impaired than I am. The lead mod has acknowledged this in comments. link reply link upvote link guiseroom link 2 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket To prove your point: the only post I’ve ever flagged was one of my own which I’m pretty sure was an accident click. link reply link upvote link smt88 link 4 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket There are a ton of alternate HN UIs for web, mobile, and terminal. I don’t use any but I’ve seen them posted about many times. link reply link upvote link dylan604 link 4 hours ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket At the risk of beating a dead horse to death (huh?), this is pretty abysmal. I understand it is, it was, it always will be, but c’mon. I can totally see hesitancy to change it, as whatever change will not make 100% of users happy and law of averages suggest a > 0% of users will be unhappy. Sometimes, devil you know.... link reply link upvote link jb1991 link 1 hour ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket Indeed I spend a significant amount of time undoing whatever I accidentally clicked. link reply link upvote link opportune link 3 hours ago link left bracket dash right bracket Wow I seem to fat finger the flag button a lot. Surprised my flagging privileges have not been revoked (or maybe they silently have). Maybe it makes sense for HN to lower the weight of flags based on the user-agent, since I assume all of these are from me using mobile link reply link upvote link shaunxcode link 6 minutes ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar link left bracket dash right bracket Same! Almost NONE of them are ones I intentionally flagged! link reply link upvote link superasn link 1 hour ago vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar

If you actually do read through that you might wonder why it says "vertical bar vertical bar vertical bar" repeatedly. I was extremely confused about this too; I'm not aware of any points where there are three "|"s in a row anywhere. Turns out, the links in the "... ago | parent | context | flag | on: ..." section have aria-hidden=true on them, so JAWS doesn't read them, but it does read every single vertical bar in between.

I'm honestly just confused at this point. I am extremely not interested in stepping over the ad hominem boundary here, but... it's clear there is an understanding of Web accessibility, and HN is, you know, the technology startup accelerator, and this is in the middle of the supposed tech capital of the world, so it's like... I look at Hanlon's razor (do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence/stupidity), and I go, well this is supposedly a place that focuses on optimizing for intelligence and "doing things correctly", in an incredibly detail-oriented industry, and I just... exploding brain moment :(

I did have a bit of an idea though. On the one hand the Silly Valley is all about "the next big idea" or "what's just around the corner", while it's well understood that SF municipality facilities (transport, city manglement, etc) are *well* underpar. Maybe, just maybe, that juxtaposition has an underdocumented impact on the culture of everyday living - focus on the inside, on your heart, on what could be, and remember that if you ignore how bad everything is, this is the key to being successful.

That's the only way I can explain the "this is how we do things here" situation in terms of the site design being what I would describe as pragmatic-to-a-fault.

With the above being said, I should point out that I incidentally happen to still be working out some pretty fundamental areas of personal equilibrium, and have a bit of an oversensitivity to invisibility and "it's fine, it's fine (narrator: it wasn't fine)" types of situations. So I have a bit of bias/lack of perspective in this area, and can't help not being a bit snappy when talking about it.