Freesound Forums

Hey there'

I'm totally blind and I've been using the site for about a decade. I know many others in my community who do as well. Allot of us have a passion for both recording and listening to sounds, for obvious reasons.
I use a "screen reader" program as do many other significantly site impaired people. In order for us to use websites properly, the website needs to be coded with good practices.

So first I'll say that the new UI actually has brought some improvements for us. We have headings for sounds now (this is great as we have keystrokes in our "screen readers" for quickly jumping between headings) which makes things far more efficient for us. We now even have some headings at different levels for other important sections, which can make it even faster for us.
The player controls are actual buttons rather than just clickable parts of the screen, which is good for the same reasons.
We now have an over all less cluttered interface at least for us, and we can also finally see the actual rating of a sound.

However, several new problems have been introduced as well, which I will lay out below.

1. On sound pages, the links for sharing on Facebook and X, as well as for creating a generic share link and an imbed are all unlabeled for us. I.E no text label on the link element.

2. On the search page, the links for a sound's pack, user's who downloaded it, and comments page all lack important context in their text labels. For instance, the "pack" link just says the name of the pack, the "users who downloaded" link just shows the number of downloads, and the comments page link just shows the number of comments. It would be very helpful [especially for newer users] if these links would include proceeding text such as "part of the pack: " "users who downloaded: " or "comments: ". That's similar to what those links used to be called in the old interface anyway.

3. We have no way to rate a sound. My screen reader can't find any controls to do so at all. We used to have 5 links, labeled with the number of stars for each one.

4. There is a button that I can press to expand another submenu of options in the menu bar. This menu includes "packs", "random sound", "charts" and "help". However, the button I press to do it is just labeled "menu" which is a bit confusing. I don't know if that's just an extension of the main menu bar I.E. "more options"? or an actual separate thing.

5. I just noticed one while making this thread. The option for choosing if you want to be sent emails for replies to the thread isn't seen as an actual checkbox or button element by my screen reader, just a non interactive piece of text.

These are just the things I've noticed so far. I haven't really delved into packs or uploading again yet. I'll try to update this with more issues if I find any.

Thanks!