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Accessibility tips in the post composer

There are a lot of things you can do in a cohost post that are inaccessible to some subset of users, but not everyone is aware of them, and there's no guarantee that an accessibility PSA written by a well-connected user will actually get to everyone's eyeballs.


I had a thought earlier today about a way of providing accessibility tips to post authors as subtle nudges in the right direction. There's Twitter's alt-text reminder, and that would be good to replicate too (although I'd vote for increasing the size of the alt text input to come first (could have sworn this had a forum thread but can't find it now)); but things like detecting if a user is using CSS animations and nudging them to put it behind a CW or something, or detecting character look-alikes that screenreaders don't read and offering alternatives (i.e. font-family CSS).


A particularly intrepid implementation could cast our friend eggbug as cohost's mascot and accessibility coach, complete with Clippy-style dialog boxes. Further research is required.


25 people like this idea

It looks like you're cascading a lot of  styles. Want help making it accessible?


7 people like this

Eggbug-as-clippy could also help provide hints on aspects of the markdown that are often confusing to new users, like putting two spaces at the end of a line to make a linebreak or how exactly one turns a horizontal rule into a readmore. Though admittedly it is probably an extremely goofy way to solve that problem.


2 people like this

I agree this is a great idea, i definitely would like this

You could implement this alongside having the css tips menu open within the post composer somehow instead of being a new page in order to make the post editor itself feel more accessible to people who don't yet know all the features

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