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Just to avoid any confusion, I'll preface this comment by saying that I'm not blind, but in the last few months have mostly been using a screenreader to avoid the migraines I was getting from even small amounts of screen use. So, in other words, I've used the site visually in the past and am now familiar enough with screenreaders and other sites to know waht an accessible site is like. Basically, the comments on HackerNews are laid out in a tree form. When you first load the page, the comment tree is expanded. You can collapse them by pressing on the little '-' next to the comment. With the tree expanded, NVDA just reads the comments as a linear stream. Of course, many forums are structured linearly, but the advantage of a tree layout is that you can have tangents like this one, without interrupting the main flow of the thread. Reddit is very similar in that regard. If NVDA can't read the tree structure, it's hard to know what is going on. From my experience, using the arrow keys ( e.g. CTRL + DownArrow ) will not report the indentation, whereas using the numpad keys ( e.g. Numpad 7 or Numpad 9 ) will report indentation, but will not indicate how deep the indentation is, so that isn't terribly helpful. It may be possible to change settings in NVDA to get this to work, but I doubt it, which leads us to the technical implementation. As others have pointed out, the comments are in a complicated nested table structure, which NVDA seems completely blind to, not even recognizing it as a table. Then, the visual indentation is created by prepending the comments with gif images, which act as spacers. The width of the spacers is determined by a 'width=' attribute. Others who are more knowledgeable than me have already pointed out alternative ways that this could be implemented, such as using <ol> or <ul> tags. It wouldn't be hard to also criticize the lack of headings, but we can leave that for another day; if this indentation issue could be sorted out, the usability of the site would go up by about 300%. I've almost stopped coming on here since using a screnreader, whereas I used to browse on here a lot -- it's one of my favourite sites. To the other commenters: thanks for the useful suggestions and insights; this had been bugging me for months. Edit: typo |