A11y Wall of Shame

Product	Grade	Comments	Last graded
Google Sheets	💀	The offered „screenreader support“ doesn’t make it accessible. Tables are no HTML tables, screenreaders cannot explore cells rowwise or columnwise. Cell content is not read. You have to export the table as Excel or CSV file to view the content, but editing is impossible.
Steam	💀	In the Steam client on Mac, screenreader doesn’t talk to me at all. Steam: An Accessibility Nightmare
Amazon	💩	Navigation is inconsistent and confusing. Not a special a11y issue, but they want their customers to be confused.
Linkedin	💩	Designed for distraction, not for usability. What does the mysterious number in the title mean? The overcharged interactivity on the web interface does not follow good design principles and technical best practices, so they couldn’t be accessible on their own. They attached a11y as an afterthought by re-inventing many wheels, instead of relying on common usage paradigms and habits. Such companies think they’re so important that blind persons want to learn their keyboard shortcuts and idiosyncrasies. As a result, they had to integrate many technical instructions with awful german translations: „Sie befinden sich in der Nachrichtenüberlagerung. Drücken Sie zum Verkleinern die Eingabetaste.“ If such hints come directly from assistive technology, blind users can choose their preferred verbosity.
Patreon	😤	Title of a post is not a heading.
Youtube	😤	Clicking the … button on a suggested video opens it instead of displaying the „no interest“ option. 😱 Screenreader cannot read the text in the comment input field.
Discord	🤖	Bloated, but most things work. Screenreader does not read the authors of reactions.
Reddit	🤖	For ages, Reddit’s web interface was legendarily inaccessible. Now they have fixed many of these problems, but the a11y descriptions for certain widgets are a bit too verbose. Seems they had to prepare for stricter a11y legislation, especially while they banned 3rd-party clients.
Mozilla Firefox	👌	Screenreader navigation on web pages is quick and reliable. The UI of Firefox itself is sometimes slow and unreliable due to its strange mixture of web-based and Mozilla UI toolkit, especially preferences and dev tools.
Github	😎	Web interface has an accessible text input, which is rare. Since Github became part of Microsoft, a11y got better and better on their site. Github Blog has very interesting articles about implementing a11y, e.g., Exploring the challenges in creating an accessible sortable list (drag-and-drop)
Jetbrains IDEs	😎	These IDEs also make blind devs more productive, thank you for the pleasure. In the last years, Java got many a11y improvements, and so did the Jetbrains IDEs. No web apps, a good decision for desktop productivity software. Steep learning curve and the usage concepts are not self-explaining, but many help resources exist.
hCaptcha	💀	The a11y feature is based on detecting a cookie in the browser via XSS, which is extremely unreliable in real-world scenarios with decent privacy settings enabled (ecological validity) Users of assistive technologies have to relax their browser security settings to make this work Captchas are nonsense. Please consider alternatives like botpoison or Turnstile, if you want to keep bots away..
Obsidian	💀	App is web-based, bad choice for production use. App is a whole mess, text content is not read properly.
Signal Desktop	💀	I spend most of my time with a desktop, not with clumsy touch devices. So the desktop version would be crucial. Signal only supports connecting devices via QR code scanning, but my desktop (Mac Mini) has no screen to scan from. Anyway, scanning QR codes is difficult and not reliable in certain scenarios. Signal is not planning to implement an alternative method
Hacker News	😤	Old web frontend with many a11y issues, but no fancy HTML tag abuse which could break a11y completely. Links are links, inputs are inputs, no surprises. There’s no single heading element, e.g., for thread titles or page titles. You have to deduce from the content: „O, this might be the title.“ Regions like navigation and main content are not clearly separated. This can be accomplished by using either HTML5 semantic tags or aria landmarks. Comments in a thread are not identifyable as self-contained entities (article tag), just paragraphs intertweened with upvote buttons and metadata. You have to remember whether these controls are above or below a comment to find the correct ones.
Steady	🤖	A bit convoluted, but useful. Some menus only open with keyboard navigation but not on normal click, menu markup feels broken.
MuseScore	😎	Lets blind musicians explore and write scores, has rudimentary braille music output. The most accessible QT app I know, but heavily relies on their own navigation concepts and hotkeys instead of the OS-native ones. Braille music is more abstract than traditional music notation. Knowing the visual concepts of music notation helps blind users to understand some concepts in MuseScore. MuseScore 4 Accessibility
EqualWeb	💀	It is technically impossible to automagically make a complex and inaccessible UI accessible with a bit of extra code. The offered overlay is not accessible itself. Gegen Accessibility-Overlays Vorgehen (Translation via Google)
Typst Web App	💀	Screenreader cannot read the text content in the web editor
Mighty Networks	💩	Feels like a Klickibunti site from the early 2000s, not like a modern web app with proper UI controls. High degree of HTML tag abuse: Many links actually should be buttons or toggles, other clickable elements are just span elements with click handlers. No navigational landmarks to move to available sections, clusterfuck. Screenreader cannot read text in the chat input. Dialogs break when too many ones are open, improper app state management.
Typst CLI	👌	Delightful syntax, helped me to design a card game as a blind person.