Accessibility Improvements

Posted on: 27 July 2021

Accessibility Improvements

One of our community members suggested on twitter that we support alternative formats for accessing our JavaScript based slides, as this can be difficult for users using screen readers. We’ve now added support for “plain text slides”, where we render the slide decks as a single long document.

The rendering is imperfect, due to how our slide deck library handles custom classes within slides, but it should still be an improvement for anyone who wants to scroll through the slides in an alternative format. You can find them linked from the first slide of each slide deck, or from the slides dropdown in the topic pages, check them out!

Additionally we’ve made a number of other minor accessibility improvements:

• Fixed 533 missing alt texts for images
• Removed some repetitive icon names names when followed immediately by their descriptive text
• Remove repetitive image labels on author badges.
• etc.

Some of these were done after (Helena Rasche) learned to use Android’s TalkBack and noticed the site could be unpleasant to go through. While absolutely not a replacement for someone who deeply understands the needs of visually impaired users or experiences such needs themselves, hopefully this makes the GTN a little bit more pleasant for everyone.