Hi admins,
I am a screen reader user who has loved to visit this site daily since it popped up years ago. However, one thing that has always been daunting is interacting with the forums, primarily navigating through the actual posts.
Some may not quite know what a screen reader is. It is basically a software program that allows people who cannot see the computer screen that well to navigate both operating system and websites through speech synthesis. It’s pretty neat, and newer games such as Mortal Kombat 11, and Madden 20 even have such a technology built into the accessibility settings.
In regards to Shoryuken.com, accessibility is actually pretty good now. So once I first visit the site I can navigate pretty easily through the front page, and move on to forums by tabbing over to the “forums” link. All is good once the page loads, and my particular software allows me to press “H” key to jump through headings. The forums topics page can easily be navigated through headings, and each time I press “H” the screen reader begins to read out and jumping to each topic i.e. General Discussion, Tournaments, SFV, Evo Champions, Trading outlet, etc. which is super great.
The tricky part comes once I hit “enter” on one of the above categories. Once I get to the specific forum, say general discussion, it takes an excruciating amount of time reading/listening to find the title for each post. There is just so much info links surrounding each post title that it gets frustrating.
Not for sure how locked down the forum platform for Shoryuken is, but one simple fix that could help me navigate the site as quick as others would be to make new forum post title links register as headings so that I could just hit the “H” key to jump to each new forum post.
Again, not for sure how feasible this is. Thanks so much for keeping the community going, and investing your time into growing this awesome place where fighters can get together. 