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Erin

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(Help, idk how to use this site and I'm too scared to ask)

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staff
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cohost patch notes vol. 73: when it rains, it pours

happy wednesday! it’s been a hell of a week at cohost florida HQ. jae was hoping to get back to full work this week, but the rapid formation and encroachment of Hurricane Idalia means that they spent yesterday preparing and today hunkering down by government order. oh well! everyone on the west coast is doing ok though, relatively speaking.

here’s what’s new:

  • we’ve fixed bugs where, if a page had logged-out asks enabled, anon-blocking any user or blocking any page from that page would also hide all pending asks from askers who were not logged in. affected asks should now have returned to the recipients’ inboxes.
  • we’re using a new piece of tooling to help catch accessibility bugs before we ship them, and already fixed the 100 or so errors it gave us upon install.
    • keyboard navigation should be improved in a lot of places on the site.
    • we’ve made more improvements to screen reader support on the login and sign-up pages, as well as in the profile editor.
    • we’ve fixed a class of mistake we made in a lot of places around how HTML form labels are supposed to be used.
      • the tool didn’t actually catch this issue but we found and fixed it anyway
    • we’re working on further improvements here. as always, if you have suggestions for how we can make cohost better, including for disabled users, you should submit and upvote suggestions on the feature request forum.
  • we’ve redesigned the bookmarked tags feed to hopefully eliminate the problems folks were having with posts from silenced or blocked users causing blank pages and incorrect error messages to display.
    • the new system we use for fetching posts should be applicable to tag pages as well, but we’re using this as a trial run to make sure it’s not too bad performance-wise.
  • we’ve fixed an issue where a wide table in a page’s profile could cover up the post column and trick you into clicking on something you didn’t expect. thanks to @bark and @delan for reporting this issue!
  • the stuff colin was working on for OAuth support has now shipped. this should be invisible to everyone for now, but it’s out there.
    • at the moment, we’re only using this for some internal applications. we’re going to introduce full public-facing support with the launch of the public API.

that’s all for this week! stay dry, stay safe, and thanks for using cohost!

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in reply to @staff's post:

arachnixe
@arachnixe

I'm really thankful to see movement on some of these long term issues. Can I just request that someone from @staff take a little time to reply to the top voted feature requests on the forum you keep linking? It often feels like the place to get ignored, but even a brief acknowledgement that a real person has seen and read a thread would go a long way to alleviate the frustration that accessibility requests seem neglected.

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kaara
@kaara

we tend to avoid commenting on things where we simply have nothing meaningful to add. Everything posted there is read, noted, tracked, and kept in mind going forward. If we dropped a "Hey thanks for posting this," on every single thread I think people would consider us disingenuous. I also doesn't really think it serves much, imo.

that being said, it's a worth considering

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arachnixe
@arachnixe

I think you underestimate the impact a little acknowledgement can have, especially for disabled users who are used to having our concerns be dismissed and ignored. It's extremely disheartening when someone is frustrated by a design that fails to accommodate their accessibility requirements, takes the time to sign up for a special account on a separate site to make their needs heard, and gets met with months (or almost a year in some cases) of silence.

I have seen comments on the bug tracker lamenting the lack of responses. (See for example the one on the "login form is inaccessible" bug report that grouses, "if you too would like to file an unacknowledged and unfixed accessibility bug..."). I myself have been frustrated and discouraged by the silence. I have had conversations with other people as frustrated by this as I am. I've seen users quit the site because they haven't seen evidence that staff intends to do anything about accessibility, and I have also discouraged disabled folks from migrating here.

To put it bluntly, if nobody communicates with us, we have no reason to assume you're any different from any other tech company that thinks accessibility is a niche concern they don't intend to worry about. Please reconsider this policy.

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vogon
@vogon

glad you like it! sorry we shipped it in the first place, but without getting too deep into the weeds of technical details, it was the sort of bug where it didn't even occur to us that it could misbehave in that way so we didn't think to test that scenario. (we're testing it now.)

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