Live data from Hacker News

Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind

support.discord.com

1–10 of 98 posts

Re: Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind

#2
People have had serious complaints about the accessibility of Discord's UI for ages, disheartening to find out that they've made it worse as part of another redesign. I wish there was more of an incentive for companies to take this seriously.

Hard to forget the bit where they removed Light Mode as a "joke". Very funny until you remember that many people can't easily use Discord in Dark Mode (in part because of how poorly Dark Mode is designed for accessibility) so you're sabotaging their experience as a gag.

Re: Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind

#5

Is "harmful" the best word here? I feel like inaccessible much better describes the issue at hand.

I think in this case the changes are making an existing situation worse, so by changing it Discord's design team is inflicting harm.

The product itself is not harmful, just inaccessible, but describing the changes as harmful seems right.

I have to use Discord every day for work, so if this redesign was interfering with that I'd be pissed. (I pay for a third-party Discord client for this and other reasons)

Re: Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind

#10
The language here rubs me the wrong way. Everything is stated as being "incredibly harmful" with no explanation beyond

> ...directly harms visually impaired individuals due to lack of visual clarity.

I am also not sure how "Elements lack unity" is related to the UI causing harm.

I don't use discord, so I have no idea how good the UI is. If the UI is bad and hard for the visually impaired to use, there is definitely a better way to communicate that.

This is how they end their post:

> This is not good UX design. It is the opposite. It harms end-users. Revert the changes.

The whole thing reads like a bad tumblr post.

Post reply on HN