Tumblr

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tony Baechler here.

When exactly did you use tumblr last? I recently signed up for an account. 
Trust me, it's a real nightmare! I think the problems started when Yahoo 
took it over. Yes, I know of someone (an artist) who publishes mostly 
photos. No, her blog isn't accessible. That isn't what I'm talking about. 
I'm talking about the actual tumblr interface. Everything requires mouse 
clicks. Maybe Orca would be better, but even NVDA couldn't read it using the 
latest Firefox. Among other things, the pages are endless, meaning that you 
can't scroll to the bottom because it continues loading more content 
indefinitely. With some work, I got messages to work, but as with everything 
else, you hear "avatar" followed by a hex number when looking at your 
contacts, so you have to guess who you're messaging. Part of this is 
probably a screen reader issue as mine is rather old now, but much of it has 
to do with dynamic content being loaded all the time.

Here is a typical example. When you go to tumblr.com and log in, (even the 
login isn't accessible) you hear several buttons. If you select Messages, 
nothing appears to happen. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page. 
Remember what I said earlier. Since new content is constantly loaded, you 
never actually get to the bottom, so don't press the down arrow. You have to 
press Shift-H to go back to the previous heading. Now, you get to the area 
where you can message someone. If you know their name on tumblr, you have to 
hope you find the search box. Sometimes it seems to randomly move, depending 
on if you messaged other people or not. Oh, I forgot. You have to scroll 
past the list of contacts it picks for you. Once you find the search box, 
you type in the name you want. In my case, I'm afb904, so enter that. The 
page dynamically updates to show any matches as you're typing, so you have 
to get out of the edit box (don't press Enter as it won't work) and scroll 
down. You hear a very long hex number with the name at the end. That shows 
up as a standard link. You access that link and you can finally write a 
message. After you're done, you can send, similar to Facebook. If I answer 
and there is a conversation, you have to scroll through the other messages 
to find the edit box. You can't use the letter "e" to jump to it because it 
wraps around to the "search tumblr" box which isn't what you want. If you 
find workarounds or know of a better way to navigate it, I'm very interested!

On 4/29/2017 5:44 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> To be fair, unless Tumblr has seriously changed since I last used it before
> migrating to WordPress, it is totally accessible if used correctly. It is a
> blogging platform, similar in many ways to WordPress or even Blogger by
> Google, it's just a different underlying back-end system handling things on
> the server, and also does include some social features that aren't as easy
> to find in the core of other similar platforms. The main thing that makes
> Tumblr less than accessible is not Tumblr itself, but the fact that it is
> primarily used to publish photos, even more than text, videos, music or
> anything else that we would be better able to parse with a screen reader or
> our ears, and the users who publish these photos don't bother to put
> captions on them in many cases. WordPress can be just as inaccessible if it
> is used to publish a site that has nothing but pictures on it. There is the
> fact that Tumblr last I knew didn't try to recognize images by telling us
> what objects it can find, but that sometimes doesn't help either when the
> software that does that just says "No automatic alt text available" or
> "image may contain: two people smiling, outdoor, nature." These do give
> other social networks a slight advantage when used by people who publish
> photos with no captions, but the automatic recognition can unfortunately be
> nearly as uninformative as Tumblr's photo publishers.
> ~Kyle