Comments on: Why are web forums so unpopular with the blindness community?

By: Monica Willyard

Monica Willyard — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:04:22 +0000

I’m glad you’re discussing this subject since it has cropped up for me several times. I prefer to skip mailing lists when I can because they clutter up my in-box and take too much time. I like the theory behind forums but find that many of them have the same weakness. My biggest stumbling block for forum use wasn’t mentioned in your post. I’ve found that many forums use nonstandard forms for posting, forms with tons of icons you need to click for formatting, in-line frames for the editors, and weird form/frame combinations where my screenreader can’t even find an edit box. The forums on http://www.paperbackswap.com are absolutely miserable to use for that reason. A forum called The Warrior Forum is even worse. It crashes JAWS whenever I try to go into the form section to post. Sometimes I can write a couple of sentences before the crash, but I can’t finish my thoughts. This is true on multiple machines with different operating systems, browsers, and versions of JAWS.

Reading forums works ok, though I admit it is slower to do than reading email. I’m willing to put up with the slower reading and navigating, but the inability to post without help leaves me feeling left out and ineffective. Those aren’t feelings I enjoy, so I only post if my need is serious and urgent. I’m sure I miss out on meeting some awesome people over there.

My solution to this issue is to turn to blogs and to use commenting as a substitute. Firefox and Web Visum let me use most blogs effectively, and I feel welcome. It would make my day if everyone used WordPress for blogging, but hey, you can’t win ‘em all. (grin)

By: Guenni

Guenni — Sun, 24 May 2009 10:30:47 +0000

Hi
I’m a blind user. I have to say that I often prefer forums over mailing lists as well. But there are situations where it’s the other way around. I’ll try to give some examples.
For support problems with the computer, I use mailing lists. That’s mainly because I tried to get useful answers in mainstream forums but as soon as I mentioned, that I can’t use a mouse I got the equivalent of blank stares. So I use mostly the mailing lists that are specifically for blind folks, because people there actually know what I’m talking about. The other reason is that it’s easier to save a mail with an useful answer, in case the problem arises again later, than to locate the answer in a thread, even if you bookmarked it.
On the other hand, I like to read and write stories. A lot of them aren’t posted in one go, but as chapters. In this case it’s a lot easier to bookmark a story thread than to save all the mails.
Another disadvantage of mailing lists someone already mentioned is all the stuff you get, but actually don’t want to read, but get anyway. In forums you can be selective.
Your’re right, forums are sometimes somewhat complicated to navigate, but for me that’s rarely enough of a problem to avoid them, thanks to screen reader shortkeys.
Guenni

By: Marco

Marco — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:53:27 +0000

A little update:

A few weeks ago, I contributed a patch to the phpBB project to make content that was put in for screen readers actually visible for them. The problem was that this content was styled with “display: none;”, which of course makes it invisible to screen readers. My patch changed that to a negative offset, modeled after various types of “Skip to content” links out there. The phpBB team accepted my patch, and now, if you go to the phpBB.com forums overview, you’ll actually hear:

256 Topics
385 Posts
Last post by [user name]

instead of just

256
385
by [user name]

This change will be in phpBB 3.5, soon to be released, and the phpbb.com community forums apparently uses a pre-release version of this.

By: Klango maciek

Klango maciek — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:33:53 +0000

Intersting post.
We’ve got over 50000 posts on klango forums, but most of them originates from our own audio-rich interface. We’re thinking about some kind of interface to other forums, and although we’ve got some ideas, there always be an issue regarding authorization.

By: ma10 (Masafumi NAKANE)

ma10 (Masafumi NAKANE) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:42:17 +0000

Twitter Comment

@geekpage メールよりもWebの方が良いという人たちもいるみたい。これはちょっと違う視点で書いてあるけど、MLを好まない人もいるんだなと思った: [link to post]

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By: Unrepentant » Blog Archive » Some Light Reading for the Weekend (11/04)

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:18:45 +0000

[...] “…it was stated that blind people prefer the exchange through mailing lists highly over any other means of exchange possible on the net today, and that this is the easiest to access medium. This has a lot of merit, since to subscribe to most e-mail lists, you don’t even need a web browser. If you know the mailing list address, you can send a subscribe request and acknowledge that by only knowing how you compose and reply to e-mails in your favorite e-mail program. Forums, on the other hand, are often secured against spam bots by CAPTCHAs, and the display is considered by many to be highly inefficient for reading.” http://www.marcozehe.de/2009/04/07/why-are-web-forums-so-unpopular-with-the-blindness-community/ [...]

By: pvagner

pvagner — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:57:13 +0000

Hello,
I think there are too many tastes for too many people. I am afraid it is not possible to give a definite answer to these questions.
Heh so you may wonder why I am commenting here.
Simply because I think I can represent a group of web forum users which is not expected.
I am blind and I prefer web forums over email. Perhaps the problem is I have never tried news groups.
I am participating in various discussion boards powered by phpBB2, phpBB3, invision board and vbuletin. And I think I have always managed to find a way on how to access next message. Vbuletin and invision display messages as tables, phpBB2 inserts seperators between messages, phpBB3 has headings etc. Yes these are themes but these are default themes so if the site administrator adds another theme it is very likelly possible to set it to default.
Another pro argument for web based forums is that you are not flooded with messages and you can simply go and look for the topic you are interested in. If you subscribe to a mailing list then according to my experience has a lot of background noise and flame wars. I can mainly see this phenomenon in the blindness related communities I am afraid.
Heh and shame on me I am not yet actively discussing at mozilla zine.

By: David Tenser

David Tenser — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:25:16 +0000

Great post Marco. Just wanted to clarify that while I shared my concerns with mailing lists for mainstream support with Dirk, I also said that if he really wants to create one, we can make that happen. My main concern is that not many people will use this (German) mailing list so it will become much of an isolated island. As you point out, mailing lists are not very popular for mainstream support since people find it simpler to just navigate a web page — a forum — compared to using an e-mail client (not everyone even has an e-mail address today).

One great idea that came up during this e-mail exchange was to do an accessibility audit on SUMO to make sure our support platform is accessible to everyone. Marco, I really think we should move forward with these ideas! Would you be interesting in leading such an audit?

By the way, we are already planning on switching to the reCAPTCHA system on SUMO, which has better accessibility support (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487139).

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:51:50 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this recently.

There is one fundamental and important reason why I don’t use Web fora,
together with several other, associated reasons.

The problem is that with a Web forum, the provider of the Web site chooses the
user interface. With my e-mail client, I choose the user interface by deciding
which mail user agent to run. I have also customized my e-mail environment to
work as I want it to do, enabling me to manage my mail efficiently using my
assistive technology of choice.

For the same reason, I like NNTP newsgroups, and have recently started relying
increasingly on gmane.org, which also has the advantage of an excellent
Web-based search engine for finding archived posts. Threading, “kill files”
and other features found in news readers (but not, typically, in forum
software) facilitate the efficient navigation of discussion groups. I suspect
this is even more so for a participant who is relying on a braille display or
speech synthesis for output, as in my case.

Both mail and NNTP news separate the protocol and the message format from the
user interface; the protocols and formats are open and there are multiple
implementations. With a Web forum, the provider is forcing everyone not only
to learn a new user interface, but eliminating that element of choice and
flexibility, thereby increasing the pain factor for users with particular
needs or preference.

RSS and ATOM have a similar advantage. Looking at my Debian package
repository, I notice a choice of ATOM/RSS readers for both the console and
graphical X environments.

Gmane is wonderful in that it can be accessed via NNTP or the Web, and the
mailing lists can be subscribed to as well, so everyone can satisfy her or his
own needs and preferences.

By: David McRitchie

David McRitchie — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:02:43 +0000

Sighted user. I use newsgroups. What I dislike about mail-lists is having it dumped into mail — would think a blind user would really dislike that, so find it very surprising that a blind user would prefer a mailing list.

I like searching web pages for more finalized / refined content, and I like searching newsgroups for up to the minute problems/solutions. This practice breaks down with Firefox and Mozilla.

What I dislike about web forums is that they show up in web searches and are really like newsgroups, in fact most are simply feeding into and out of actual newsgroups, so are almost always duplicates of a newsgroup posting — this is not true with Firefox and Mozilla as the Mozilla and MozillaZine hosted pages/sites are more controlled. I’ve noticed that some forums allow revision rather than continuous replies which I hadn’t known about and is probably a lot more an advantage than a disadvantage if caught before someone replies.

Blogs though not mentioned are somewhat in between, some are treated as single subject per blog so are more like webpages with categorized data, and some are more like a diary and most people wouldn’t want to see except for following specific blogs.

By: John Foliot

John Foliot — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:52:42 +0000

Maybe it’s because I’m old school, but I too prefer Mailing lists, especially well established ones with high ‘etiquette’ standards (such as threaded responses). I find many forums are populated with too many “me too” responses from contributors who really have little more to offer, but feel compelled to comment anyway, so that they can be heard. It’s a signal-to-noise ratio thing: I follow many lists and have little patience wading through that kind of blather.

As well, I agree with Arthur that the explosive growth of web-based mail clients may have an effect here – ‘mainstream’ users simply do not use a mail client the same way that us ‘geeks’ do.

Perhaps as well it has to do with the subject matter – my subscription lists tend to be tightly focused on web accessibility and web standards issues: hardly ‘mainstream’ stuff, and as such the current threads need little preamble, as most followers are already fairly up to speed on the topic, unlike forums where most people arrive with a virtual blank look on their faces – it is a starting point, rather than a recurring instance.

As an interesting aside, I have also noted recently that many of the mailing lists I monitor have seen a marked decrease in both volume and ‘value’ – instead I’ve noticed that those communities have moved to social network tools such as Twitter, so perhaps one of the other differences here is that forums are content aggregators, whilst lists and Twitter tweets are an ongoing conversation.

By: Arthur

Arthur — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:47:29 +0000

I’m not blind and prefer mailing lists too. They are much more standardized. I can use the program of my choice to read and archive the mails, I can thread, not thread, mark read etc. in the same way for all mailing lists and don’t have to figure out yet another forum software. I don’t have to remember dozens of passwords and usernames to access all the different forums.

I think what people like about forums is their discoverability. You often find what you’re looking for faster in forums than in the terrible web front ends of some of the mailing list programs out there. So what’s needed is probably a really good interface for searching through mailing list archives. Another point is probably that nontechnical users don’t use a real mail client anyway. They either use some abomination of a “light” version of a mail client or one of the many webmail clients. Which makes the difference between mailing lists and forums look smaller.

By: randomscrap (Blog Feed Gobbler)

randomscrap (Blog Feed Gobbler) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:39:12 +0000

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[MozillaPlanet] Marco Zehe: Why are web forums so unpopular with the blindness community?: Last w.. [link to post]

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By: Marco

Marco — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:38:45 +0000

Hi Zack, thanks for your response! I’ve updated the questions section of the post with the “other side’s” questions as well.

Is there a difference for you interacting with newsgroups versus mailing lists? For newsgroups, you need to switch the newsgroup, or sometimes even the nntp server, for different topics. Only if you want to reply and use a client like Thunderbird, replying is instant as with mailing lists. Does the interaction model of newsgroups bother you, or is it just the same as mailing lists for you?

By: Zack

Zack — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:54:11 +0000

I’m on the technical end of the continuum of sighted users that you describe, and I hate forums Mainly because each forum is its own walled garden, requiring me to maintain a separate login and check separately for new messages. Even if the forum sends me email when there are replies to a thread, I have to switch back to the forum interface to respond, which is annoying. (I have the same problem with Bugzilla.)

You talk about ways to make forums more attractive for blind users; I am more interested in what the nontechnical users don’t like about mailing lists. “Hate”? Really? Why?

By: gezlemon (Gez Lemon)

gezlemon (Gez Lemon) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:01:13 +0000

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Why are forums so unpopular with blind users? [link to post] (via @MarcoZehe)

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