Discord: Inaccessible To The Blind, Devs Won't Budge

Logo for the Discord chat app

Discord is a wildly popular chat application for both desktop computers and mobile phones. It has focused its branding message as an app that helps build communities, and has over 25 million users as of December of last year. Discord also remains completely inaccessible to blind users on any platform. Even Discord for the iPhone-- a platform that has been praised for having very accessible applications and ways to make apps accessible for the blind-- remains inaccessible.

The Discord developers seems keen on keeping its app that way, too. They answer accessibility requests as just a "quality of life" feature and thus not a reason to have to make the app accessible at all. One totally blind Mac user filed a bug report that showed Discord wouldn't work with the Voiceover program-- a screen reader that reads the text out loud. The official Discord response was that he should just use the Zoom program. Zoom is a program that lets you magnify portions of the screen. This is like telling a deaf person letting you know your closed captions on your video aren't working that all they need to do is turn the volume up.

After some push back over several months by visually impaired users, Discord developers said that if this request can get enough upvotes, they’ll consider adding in visually impaired accessibility features.

If you're a Discord user, all you need to do is login, upvote that link, and maybe even leave a comment. It's pretty crappy that a text and voice chat app is inaccessible to the visually impaired, especially an app that talks about building communities.