Accessibility related questions, mostly

[SingingMosaic]

I have several questions. I'm using a screenreader, NVDA to be specific, and I'm on Chrome, and I'm on Windows 10.

First one: Is there a keystroke to get to all the formatting options? I can see the application box, and beneath that an area for attachments, beneath that the notify of replies option and beneath that cancel and submit. Screenreaders don't have easy ways to show you how things are organized on a screen, they just lay it all out vertically. A feature called object nav in this one will let you move through all the content of whatever window you're in as sets of trees, using keystrokes involving the arrows, but even that doesn't give you a good understanding of visual layout. All this to say that, when looking around and reading information on how to do certain things, location related instructions have been sadly not usable for me. This is relevant again in a minute. Going back to the question I wandered from, if there isn't a keystroke or a section of the screen I can get to using the keyboard that I haven't found, would all my formatting hold if I wrote everything in Word first and pasted it over? I've seen a couple things, particularly in roleplaying, that rely a lot on colored text, for example. Thankfully there are no barriers to knowing when different colors are being used using NVDA anymore, because I can get it to announce color changes to me, and up until recently you couldn't do that. This isn't something I've found an area to implement in my own text, along with the rest of the formatting, on the site that I can get to yet. I can get it to happen if I can format in Word, though.

Second: I found a post about spoilers which indicated that there was a way to implement them using text. Please please tell me this is still the case *crosses fingers* because I may have a hard time depending on what the answer to the first question is.

And third, last one I can think of for now: I can't find any way to give reputation. I might just be so new that this hasn't opened up to me yet, since I don't have much of it. At the bottom of the content of someone's post I can see a link, labeled with what looks like part of the text of the link to the post itself, and sometimes but not always a second link which looks the same. These two may be separated by a number. And beneath that, quote buttons, and beneath that, signature stuff.

Oof. Sorry for my giant and complicated post. I wish I were one of those blind people who knew tons about technical accessibility, because then I could give whoever puts the mechanics of the thing together some good info. One of said blind people might be coming around soon, but their life is chaotic, so not sure when that will happen.

For the most part though, this is all very accessible, sometimes in a quirky way I've had to get used to. Using Firefox, I can't get to any of my user stuff. I spent ages bashing my head against it until I decided to try it in Chrome and found that I could get to the notifications/messages/profile links at the top of the page. They don't even appear to NVDA in Firefox.

[Honorless]

Hmm, 1) Yes, formatting usually carries over

2. You can access hide function by using this directly atop the part you want to spoiler:

{  Hide contents}

just remove the curly braces

Edit: doesn't seem to work. Use Spoiler within square brackets.

3. You should be able to give rep from the beginning, maybe it's the device? The site functions deteriorate on some devices, I've been told. Though a few profiles are having accessibility issues currently. @Chaos?

Edited May 6, 2020 by R J

[Chaos]

@SingingMosaic It is my sincerest apologies that it has taken me so long to respond. 

I admit, I have not used screen readers. Our software has some custom modifications but is predominantly created by Invision Power Suite. I am not sure how to implement the fixes you need, and the more things we do custom, the harder it is to update the software. We are on a bit older software version than we should, and I can hope that a newer version will be better for screen readers. I honestly don't know.

I know that is an extremely disappointing response that is basically a shrug, but I will definitely contact you when we do some software updates to see if things improve. I will also try to be cognizant of this when I make customizations to the default theme, so I don't inadvertently break something for you.

[SingingMosaic]

OK. Thanks for responding. I wanted to let you know my updates on this, after having used this for a while.

The editor is accessible with my screenreader, because of the object nav feature I mentioned before. I wasn't using it inside the application section itself, and I eventually found the formatting options there. It may not be accessible to others, I haven't used another screenreader since 2014, so I can only give real feedback for this one. Based on your response I can understand why that would be difficult to change, but I wanted to make sure you found out that it is accessible for some.

I also found the rate button, it just isn't labeled. So it's usable, but giving it alt text could be useful for other new members.

Now, the one thing that remains somewhat problematic for me is tagging people. I can do it, but it's quirky. I would try to go into describing that here, but I'm thinking of writing a 17th Shard accessibility tips for NVDA file. I haven't messed with any of the visual elements of the site, because no one in my environment can see enough for me to experiment with it.

When I get that finished, where do you recommend I put it? Should I just go ahead and post it in the 17S forum and update it as I find out more? I don't want it to disappear in case we get more NVDA using Sharders, or in case we get a JAWS user who wants to contribute to it.

Edited April 22, 2020 by SingingMosaic
Clarification

[18th Shard]

@SingingMosaic I will edit this in a second once I have made sure it works, but I believe to spoiler text, you can use the following code: open square bracket spoiler close square bracket ( like this without the period [.spoiler] ) at the beginning. Then put the text you want hidden in the spoiler box, then the same code at the end with a slash in front of the word spoiler (like this without the period [./spoiler] ). 

Nesting the open spoiler and close spoiler code will create layered spoiler boxes - one inside the other.

Test text below:

Like this.

Edit: It does work

Edited April 24, 2020 by 18th Shard

[SingingMosaic]

Thanks! I ended up verifying that one but it took a bit of fiddling, and now for this file I want to create on this subject, that adds some clarification.