HN's accessibility issues can be worked around. The only big one that's actually pretty annoying is the lack of hierarchy, it's hard to figure out who is replying to whom.
Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you? I'm pondering writing an alternative frontend for HN with accessibility in mind--I don't have experience with that, and am not affiliated with HN, but am willing to see if I could make this work.
Would you also appreciate an easier way to find replies to your own comments?
> Do you have an example of a website with a comment hierarchy that works well for you?
I'm not the original commenter, but I am a screen reader user who works in accessibility.
Unfortunately, I don't have too many good examples; the problem of hierarchical commenting systems being difficult to navigate is common across the web. There is a Reddit client for iOS, Dystopia[1], that does this extremely well for users of the built-in screen reader, VoiceOver[2], by allowing entire threads/subthreads to be collapsed and/or skipped over. On the web, you'd want to look into using hierarchical headings, nested lists and the like, to allow the structure to be conveyed semantically. HN is inexcusably bad at this, as there isn't a single heading anywhere on the site.
Not a website, but Dystopia for Reddit, an iOS client, does this well. It just announces the level of each comment, where direct replies to a post are l1, replies to those are l2 and so on. This is probably the easiest way.
