It's especially shameful that a large company like Reddit can't manage to.. do HTML right? It really doesn't take that much extra time to do the basics. They need buttons with _labels_.

How did they not get sued already? Was it just because users had access to 3rd party apps?

Modern design philosophy is that buttons with labels are messy and complicated so they should be replaced everywhere by hamburgers and hieroglyphs.

I threw up a bit in the back of my mouth typing that, but it's true -- what started as spatial triage on mobile is now the universal design language everywhere, and it sucks.

Regardless, there's still aria-label.

I think they’re referring to aria-labels, not visible text.

Product owners don’t care about accessibility. They care about time to market for 99.999% of your users, or for many products 100% of the users. The products I build are not accessible. Designers work hard to ensure they’re not or quite hard to make accessible at best. Modals on modals on modals with important content changing all over the place!

Is it on a "product owner" to care about accessibility? Or engineers to build things properly? If this was any other engineering field - civil, mechanical, electrical, there would be standards which we seem to lack / fail to enforce

If the product owner directs work at a ticket level and never assigns it to anyone, it's their fault it isn't there. If the engineers have more autonomy than I've seen at a company are were able to decide what to work on, then sure blame the engineers.

> there would be standards which we seem to lack / fail to enforce

This is by design. Software developers are hardly "engineers". They build what the business wants, quickly, and worry about the "properly" after product-market fit is found (or so they're told). This dynamic would be upended if software engineering were licensed.

I can’t even convince design not to make the text grey on grey. It’s not just “disabled” users who are suffering this nonsense.

I get paid the same not to fight. More even, because I’m a team player.

The way this gets fixed in an org isn't by engineers winning fights with designers.

It's by someone at a higher level deciding that they care about accessibility (or that they care about not getting sued), and introducing constraints which their designers and engineers must work within, and making compliance with the constraints part of the QA process.

The way it gets fixed across organizations is government regulation

Relatively few engineers in the US are licensed. It's fairly common with civil engineering because at least moderately senior engineers are signing off on drawings for regulators. But mechanical/chemical/etc. engineers are not in general licensed overall--maybe 10-20% are the numbers I've seen.

And that's not even counting all the jobs like sales engineer, mud engineer (oil business), etc. that are really more engineering-adjacent jobs.

When I took the engineer in training exam--never had a reason to follow through on a PE, it basically required things like a four-year engineering degree, working under someone for some number of years, passing the PE exam, and presumably signing code of ethics, etc. For certain jobs, it is pretty much a requirement past some level but mostly doesn't matter a lot.

> worry about the "properly" after product-market fit is found (or so they're told).

Thankfully for Reddit they found the product market fit 10 years ago.

They're just a bad software company.

This is why I found it hilarious when people say they prefer proprietary software because a commercial company will produce better code than volunteer individuals.

Train drivers are also called engineers, and much software development can be seen as engineering in this general sense.

It's on product, because it's an ask from the customer (and requires planning into the roadmap - it doesn't come for free).

Wasnt there some push in the US to make websites acessible or face some very hight fines ? I do remember something like that.

It matters a lot when you have a Gov. contract of some sort.

Reddit doesn't sell to the USG or any US schools or etc.

Interesting, so that is the difference. Thanks! :)

Fortunately the ADA[1] means that you can easily reach their real customer support AKA legal department.

[1] https://www.boia.org/blog/the-robles-v.-dominos-settlement-a...

Having a site good for accessibility means it is also easily scraped, if it is easily scraped no need to pay for API access, and there goes the money grab

It is not they cant do it right, they do want to do it right because they need to monetize the site to appease the VC's,

Anything that can prevent that, including accessibility, goes

A custom program can find the buttons by label. It's just not labeled in a way the screenreader is looking for.

it is really not that much harder to scrape using XPath and no labels if you know what you're doing…but only if you can see things, of course.

Because (to oversimplify things by a lot) you don't have to care in most cases. You have legal requirements as a public institution, when selling to governments / educational institutions or as an employer (depending on country), but requiring all privately-run, commercial websites to be accessible is usually not a thing. This is not legal advice by any means, and the actual situation is way more complicated than that.

Totally agree. Whilst I think that Reddit _should_ support their blind users in this case, as a general/blanket rule that you can sue anyone who doesn't then everyone's blogs/dinky little sites need perfect/proper accessibility done for them, which just isn't feasible.

Reddit is large enough that if they don't have a positive response for that sub then they're just a total disgrace. Who TF wants to make it harder for blind people to live their lives? Only evil corpo fuckers, that's who.

sounds like they will be sued now! ADA trolling is a thing and it does catch big fish.

if you look at the regular reddit "new" interface you'll totally understand how this occurs.

the interface is a mess, accessibility concerns or not. It's truly an equal opportunity offender in all the worst case.

As a non-web-dev who sometimes builds my own toys, when you say someone building buttons without labels is lawsuit-worthy, it makes me think you're all saying something other than what I'm interpreting. I'm guessing you mean more than

    <button type="button">My Label</button>

or something like that?

That would be the label of a button yes. I think in practice, what's missing is describing the label of a button (or another element with that role) with an aria-label attribute.

Buttons that miss a label are often an icon without text and label (e.g. a delete button with a trash icon).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

Thanks for the explanation!

The lawsuit worthy aspect is that labels for buttons are super important for understanding what a button does. A lack of labels (either through not putting text inside the <button> element or using a technique like aria-label) can quickly make an interface unusable for a blind person - the visual equivalent would be completely blank, identical buttons. That barrier is what someone could sue over.

It can also quickly make an interface unusable for a non-blind person, if they block external fonts.

My understanding is that a button used like this is already accessible.

However a button that looks like this:

  <button type="button">
    <img src="/delete.png" alt="Delete post" />
  </button>

Is not. Screen readers will read the simple text on the button, but any descendants of the button will be considered purely presentational (even if as in the example above the img tag includes an 'alt' attribute, it won't be read).

Modern screen readers will now often parse text content out of the button even if there are descendants, but this behaviour is not reliable or according to spec.

To fix:

  <button type="button" aria-label="Delete post">
    <img src="/delete.png" alt="Delete post" />
  </button>

There are other techniques as well such as using CSS to hide text (not with 'display: none' though, which also hides from screen readers, meaning this often feels a bit hacky) or using a hidden element with text content and aria-labelledby to reference the element's ID.

This is a pretty good walk through: https://www.sarasoueidan.com/blog/accessible-icon-buttons/#a...

No, your first code snippet is totally fine. The button's name comes from its descendent elements by default. In this case, the `alt` attribute of the image provides the name.

Sara is good source for accessibility information but I think you've misinterpreted that post. If an icon button uses an `img`, making the image's `alt` the name of the button works well. If the button's icon comes from an inline SVG, background image, or icon font, I recommend Sara's first technique, visually hidden text within the `button`; names from text nodes are more robust than from attributes (`alt` being an exception, in part because it has been around far longer).

Thank you for the correction! Always good to learn.

From recent reports (based on their layoffs), "large" means around 1800 employees. I know they're not all developers, but I don't think labeling the mod buttons is beyond them.

It's much easier to label buttons when you work for a small company, because you know exactly who does what and exactly who is responsible for labelling the buttons and you know exactly what's going to happen to you when you label them, so you just do it and have that debate whenever it happens. Bystander effect, etc.

It's true but that falls more into the explanation-not-excuse category. I bet there's someone advocating for better ad partner integration and driving projects for that - no reason they can't have it for UX/UI/Accessibility too.

Eh, sounds unprofitable

It is worth pointing out that even with a 10/10 sight, moderating reddit is a nightmare. If it wasn't for the mod toolbox plugin, I would have probably resorted to making CLI tools instead(many of which I have since reddit offers an extremely limited options for moderating, nuking comments, threads and so on). That said, this is absolutely nothing compared to the unholy mess that is moderating from android/ios. Most moderators plainly refuse to do it. I moderate a big sub and what we do is we have a discord chat and whenever something needs to be taken care of fast and someone notices it on mobile, they simply alert everyone on discord so someone near a computer can handle it.

I agree that their mod access on mobile leaves a lot to be desired and will add that for some people, use of a mobile device is for accessibility reasons.

To drive the point home, there was a point in my life when I was unable to use anything except a mobile device, because I programmed constantly, day and night, for weeks, trying to build a hair rained business about 3D printed jewelry you could share on social media and fork (I called it "social jewelry", I find it kinda cringe and laugh about it now).

I hurt my wrists very badly (due to abysmal typing posture and a refusal to stop working in the face of "minor" pain) and was unable to use a computer for ten months. I could only use a mobile device (and sparingly at that). One might say I was foolish and reaped what I sowed and shouldn't be accommodated for a problem I brought on myself, but what can I say, I saw young and stupid and I thought I was being gritty.

I'm sure many of you can relate to a story like that.

(Figure out your workspace ergonomics, folks. And don't type through pain, take a break, for days or longer if necessary.)

Also: Even if you are not impaired, a phone can go with you and theoretically let you keep tabs on things while running errands, on your break at work, etc. Your work computer may not be a means for you to login to Reddit and moderate anything, even on your break.

There's a reason a lot of stuff is optimized for mobile first these days.

"When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you'd have to say we succeeded."

- Steve Wozniak referring to the fact that people only stare at their iPhones anymore

To be fair, iOS has some of the best accessibility of any computing platform ever. That Reddit managed to screw it up is a testament to THEIR skill, not apples

Moderation on mobile is a nightmare because moderating a single item often involves several distinct actions: approve/remove comment, read/edit user note, ban user, edit ban note, etc. None of these have an unified default interface and most mods only know it from using mod toolbox. Mobile moderation-oriented 3rd party apps are unsatisfactory because they are, well, unofficial and Reddit provides no guidance or resources beyond the API itself whatsoever. It has been improving somewhat over the past two years with many web mod tools being added or revamped, but it's hard to build and maintain trust with the moderator community when Admins constantly make one unpopular move after another.

Reddit successfully offloaded content moderation onto a group of volunteers since the very beginning. This is a massive cost saving factor compared to other major social media platforms. It is only fair for Reddit to invest a small amount of those savings in return to enable volunteers achieve better efficiency.

"It's important for a sub for disabled individuals to have mods with that disability."

Reddit is notorious for having mods on various special-demographic subreddits where members of that demographic would not necessarily recognize the mod as a fellow member. The cloak of anonymity means, however, that few get any inkling unless they bother to investigate (unlikely on a website and an app that invite passivity) or it eventually erupts into scandal.

For example the /r/Netherlands subreddit is ran by trolls who are not from the Netherlands, and does not allow the usage of the Dutch language in the subreddit at all. Instead /r/theNetherlands is the proper subreddit.

The fact that reddit allows moderators to hide the modlist nowadays only makes things worse. You have absolutely no idea who is running things anymore.

Powermods are a real problem with reddit. Letting whoever was the greasiest nerd in 2007 and registered some common word, phrase, or brand name as their personal domain (including in some cases, commercializing it for personal gain) is an obvious problem, and there is no mechanism whatsoever for removing them. The only option is to try and restart the community using another name instead - hence the proliferation of real_x or true_x subreddits. And you will never do anything about the newbies who just search "kleenex" and get the sub with the powermod instead of the true_kleenex one with the actual community.

you have some mods who are notionally in charge of dozens of subreddits - and reminder that one of those powermods was most likely Ghislane Maxwell lol. And at that point you have to be getting some financial or personal benefit from it, because at that point it's a job, you can't moderate a dozen major subreddits in your spare time. So you either make a deal with the brand, or you do it to shape public discourse, etc.

In some respects that's what's going on here too, is powermods see an actual threat to their power, and would rather take their subs dark and raise a pitchfork mob than go quietly. But something has to be done about it sooner or later.

It's this awkward compromise where powermods do a ton of unpaid work for reddit, but they also are not entirely a benevolent force either, there are a lot of them that are really shitty and are kind of namesquatting on important turf. But there's nothing that can be done about it without them all taking their subs private, and if you just eject them then you better have a system in place to replace them afterwards. And you better be ready to replace all of them because they'll all go dark in "solidarity". The usual problems of a coup, really.

The real answer is that you should use Lemmy and if there's two r/kleenex's then oh well, let search optimization direct people to the "good one" and the powermod can be king of the bad one. But Lemmy can't be commercialized for (pinky in mouth) one billion dollars! and SEO doesn't work properly inside a single domain like this, so this is the status quo.

I'm sure there's some lessons there for founders... if you are going to rely on unpaid labor you need to do the 4chan thing and make it clear they're janitors and not stakeholders in your platform, and hammer down any significant power-centers that start to form. Because at this point the reality is they are de-facto stakeholders, whether Reddit likes it or not.

The month before you sell the company is just the absolute wrong time to pick a big fight with your union. And I’m saying this as someone who is not a fan of this particular union.

> The fact that reddit allows moderators to hide the modlist

Luckily, only on the slow version of reddit.

It's hidden on the old version of reddit as well.

Do you have an example? Never heard of that, only the opposite.