HN it's very obviously bad for accessibility, small click/touch targets, grey-on-grey text with v. low contrast in some situations (by design), poor indent-level visibility. Using 'shade of grey' to convey information is never going to be great.
Table-based layout can screw up screen-readers, I assume it's still 'tabulated but non-tabular'. Way back screen-readers used to assume the first tr contained th even if it wasn't marked up that way.
It would be interesting to hear from people who use assistive tech for HN how much of a problem it causes them in practice.
> It would be interesting to hear from people who use assistive tech for HN how much of a problem it causes them in practice.
I use a screen reader and am a frequent reader of HN. Obviously, much of the site's content is textual - you can't include images in comments AFAIK and it's extremely rare for people to link to graphical content as people often do on Reddit. So from that point of view, the site is an oasis away from the often visual nature of the modern web. On the other hand, there is absolutely no way for my screen reader to gauge whether a comment is a child of another, quickly jump past a child thread that I'm not interested in, quickly move up to the parent or grandparent of the current comment, etc.
TL;DR: the content is accessible because it's text, but accessible navigation is non-existent.
Table-based layout can screw up screen-readers, I assume it's still 'tabulated but non-tabular'. Way back screen-readers used to assume the first tr contained th even if it wasn't marked up that way.
It would be interesting to hear from people who use assistive tech for HN how much of a problem it causes them in practice.