[benrbray]

I'm saying we shouldn't make things substantially worse for 95% of people just to make things marginally better for 5%. Usually "accessibility" on the web means adding 1em padding around everything so that I can only see one comment at time on my 39" monitor.

The parent comment mentioned CSS changes, but I basically think the appearance should stay the same, and any accessibility improvements can probably be accomplished by changing the HTML for better screen reader compatibility, if needed.

[realityking]

There’s more to accessibility than just supporting screen readers, though that’s what people seem to think of first.

Here’s a good starting point from Mozilla covering accessibility: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

[benrbray]

Most of the advice on that page is about using the correct semantic HTML elements as well as aria annotations, which is what I had in mind. Basically the appearance should stay the same, but I can definitely see how fixing up the HTML could make the page more navigable by keyboard / screen reader / etc..

[searchableguy]

For one, HN could stop using gif tags for indenting the comments and use modern css instead.

It's one of the only sites which does this today.

[Flimm]

HN is terrible to use on touchscreens (smartphones, tablets, certain laptops) and I wouldn't be surprised if more than 5% of HN's target audience are negatively affected by it. And I doubt that many people use 39 inch monitors, certainly not 95% of the target audience.

[weare138]

It's not the appearance. Load it on a mobile browser and you'll see what everyone is talking about. You wouldn't even have to change the desktop version. Just have a mobile option too. HN's layout is so deadpan simple is would be incredibly easy to build a mobile interface with a modern CSS framework.