Accessibility for Blind Users

[vtk]

Halloween night, I intended to revert my avatar from the jackolantern back to the shiny orange sign.  I was unable to do so because of a power outage, and my phone's browser doesn't support file upload elements in browser forms.  When I got around to turning on my desktop PC this evening, I found my monitor backlight had died.  I was unable to use another monitor, as the two I tried both reported no signal – probably a failure of the DVI/VGA adapter I was using.  So I did what my blind friends would do: launch a screen reader utility and use the computer that way.

I was able to change my avatar back, but I noticed most text fields on the edit-profile page are unlabeled.  Sure, on the screen we can see text next to each one, but those bits of text aren't semantically connected to the text fields in a way that the computer can understand (and report to a blind user).  I'm sure this can be remedied with proper use of the <LABEL> element and its for attribute in HTML.

[corco]

I have no comment other than to say a blind roadgeek (that's been blind since birth) would be a fascinating person to meet.1

[hotdogPi]

When I saw the title I thought it was about blind people being able to drive.

[vtk]

I have no comment other than to say a blind roadgeek (that's been blind since birth) would be a fascinating person to meet.1

I met a blind guy once (a friend of a friend) who was kind of roadgeeky.  He had an interest in various new Interstates, but he didn't seem to be up to date with what's been going on with those recently.  I think he's blind from birth, but I'm not 100% sure.

When I saw the title I thought it was about blind people being able to drive.

They're working on that, actually.  But self-driving cars will probably be a more practical solution.

[Scott5114]

Unfortunately, this would be something that SMF would have to change, since any modifications we made to the software would be overwritten the next time we did an update.

If you can write PHP and would like to submit a patch to SMF, it would end up here when that update is released.