As the r/Blind mod team announced on July 1st 2023, Reddit has made it impossible for blind people to moderate on mobile. We're bringing you this post to update the community on the developments since that time.
Reddit's Apps Are Now Less Accessible
As a point of order, r/Blind mods will not be exhaustively auditing Reddit apps or providing Reddit Inc. with unpaid accessibility testing services. We have and will continue to report bugs whenever appropriate, as would be expected from most users. That being said, the updates to Reddit's Android and iOS apps announced in June have significantly degraded the user and moderation experience. There are mounting issues regarding stability and functionality affecting disabled users and the broader Reddit community.
In the specific context of screen reader accessibility, the current app versions have regressed in:
- Control labelling
- Focus order
- Focus control
- Feature discoverability
- Stability
- Efficiency
This situation further cements the mod team's perception that Reddit Inc. is ill-equipped to provide an accessible experience, compatible with the expectations set by the broader social media landscape - at least when Twitter had an accessibility team.
Accessibility Feedback Sessions
On July 19th, Reddit announced "more ways to connect live with" them, including an Accessibility Feedback Group. Several r/Blind mods have filled out the feedback group form and have yer to be contacted, in fact, u/MostlyBlindGamer expressed concern that more direct feedback options were not available.
So How Do We Report Bugs?
Reddit admins have been aware that the Reddit bug report page crashes when using assistive technology, since June 25th 2023. The recommended mitigation has been to mod mail r/ModSupport. In this process, an r/Blind mod has been asked to submit screen recordings through mod mail, which does not support attachments, notwithstanding the futility of this request, since Talkback audio isn't recorded when screen recording on Android. This further shows that Reddit Inc. is not equipped to triage accessibility bugs.
Since then, the user experience has degraded to the point of making communication over mod mail ineffective. On July 19th, u/MostlyBlindGamer explicitly told Reddit admins blind moderators were effectively unable to use mod mail and reiterated the request for contact for email.
Today, twenty-nine days after being made aware of the issues when reporting bugs, as per our continuous request via DM and the latest r/Blind announcement, the accessibility@reddit.com email address has now been made available, hopefully making it easier to raise these issues. As of this writing, Reddit has not replied to a message sent to this address by a moderator.
A Note On r/blindsurveys
We do what we do, despite adversity, to support our community. A part of that is making r/Blind a place for and by blind and visually impaired people, while still enabling research and awareness from the sighted and academic communities. That has been accomplished by hosting r/blindsurveys. Much to our disappointment, all of our efforts to provide proper moderation and safety for this subreddit have been hamstrung by Reddit's increasing accessibility failures.
We have made the subreddit private, not as a form of protest, but as mere self-preservation. While we acknowledge and appreciate the support of our sighted moderators, r/blindsurveys is not essential to our community and their efforts serve r/blind best. Its loss will be subtle, quiet and perhaps forgotten, but its impact may be greater than some assume.
Effective today, easily searched questions and surveys directed at blind and visually impaired people, are not allowed on this platform.
OK, Is There Any Good News?
Yes! A few buttons are now labeled - hooray! Not enough to make the apps useable, but we like to acknowledge progress.
r/place is not blind, low-vision or even keyboard accessible, however the broader Reddit community is supporting r/Blind in keeping our Snoo on r/place. Because we care about accessibility, we shared that news on an alternative platform that supports alt text for images in posts and comments.
In fact, r/save3rdpartyapps and r/ModCoord have been supporting this community since the start. The r/Blind team would like to thank all of the Redditors who through great deeds or kind words have made us feel seen, heard and welcome.