Minor feature requests for full screen reader accessibility

Feature Requests
1

Hello, everyone. In October of 2024, Facebook shut down their Basic Mobile site, which was fully screen reader accessible. Their main site and apps are terrible to use with screen readers. I therefore switched to Friendica. After awhile, I noticed many issues, to the point that I switched again, this time to Akkoma, more specifically to the Blob.cat instance. My experience here has been truly wonderful, from the people to the site itself. However, I have noticed some very minor problems that I must mention. Note that I mostly use Firefox, Windows, and the NVDA screen reader. I am totally blind, so I cannot comment on any visual elements.

  1. Many buttons are unlabelled and simply say “button”. This is true on the main page, in settings, and when viewing posts and tabs in profiles. Most work once pressed. They just need to be labelled.

  2. Searching for people, tags, groups, and posts is inaccessible. I can enter the edit field and write my text, but then, there are two unlabelled buttons next to that. The first simply takes me back to the edit field. The second does nothing. I am assuming this is a submit button that doesn’t work via the keyboard. There is also a Preferences button on my home page that appears to do nothing. My work-around has been to create a post with hash tags that I wish to follow, and I have been able to do so from there, but I must still use a client (TWBlue) to search for people and posts.

  3. There is no way to stop notifications from appearing on my main page, when viewing other timelines, followers, etc. I always see my notifications first and must go through them in order to reach the content I’m seeking. Please consider creating a collapse button or a separate page for Notifications. If there is already a way to do this in settings and I have missed it, please let me know.

  4. The page renders very differently in Chrome than in Firefox. In Chrome, I can’t see anything but my notifications, so I can’t get to my profile or the other timelines. In firefox, I usually can. But I just had an experience in which I couldn’t. This may simply have been a slow-loading page or some such, though I think it’s because it was loading so many posts and notifications. This is very frustrating when I just want to get to my profile, settings, or even other timelines. Those options always need to be there. Maybe, sighted people experience this as well. It also may be that they do show in Chrome, but I didn’t give them enough time to load. I think the solution from 3 would easily solve this problem

I am not a programmer or web developer, butI have been a computer user for over twenty years. I am beginning to learn about website accessibility testing, and it seems this is just a matter of using semantic html and ensuring that things are labelled and accessible with the keyboard. I don’t think these steps would take long to implement, and they would make Akkoma completely accessible to the blind, giving us a great alternative to other sites which are either not or are full of other limitations. I am fully willing to test any changes made and to offer any suggestions I can from a user’s perspective.

1 Like
2

yeah, accessibilty is a massive (pardon the pun) blindspot for us, given that i don’t think anyone in the main contributor pool uses assistive technologies

thanks for bringing it up - whilst our frontend is pretty old and has been through the hands of many, many people, i’m sure we can make it easier to use

i’ll raise these as formal issues on our software forge and see if we can’t do something about them

3

I sincerely appreciate this. As it is, Akkoma is already wonderfully accessible. It’s just these thiny things that would make it perfect.

4

I must add another issue that I thought had been resolved, which is why I didn’t mention it. I can’t view my followers and those whom I am following. I can see the numbers, and tell that I am supposed to be able to click on the words Following and Followers, but when I do, they are not displayed. I was able to make it work a few days ago. But now, it’s just showing me all of my posts and none of the accounts in question. I did subscribe to many, instead of merely following them, and I will unsubscribe from several. But the lists should still be available. I noticed the same thing when trying to follow tags. If the posts on the given tag were up-to-date, I could find the follow/unfollow button. But if they weren’t, I had to go through many of them, and in several cases, I just chose not to follow the tag.

5

This is part of the first issue, but it is slightly different. When editing my profile, there are many checkboxes that don’t act as such. They say “check” but they don’t state whether they are checked or unchecked and I’m not even sure if I can do anything with them. After I try to check some, an unlabelled button appears next to them, so I thought this was a way of telling if a box was checked or not, but there are some where the button remains, no matter what I do, so that doesn’t work. An example of this is whether or not I want my posts and account to be discoverable by other services. Whenever I try to press any of these buttons, nothing happens.