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.
It's exactly the kind of demonizing language that has unfortunately become common in recent years. By using dishonest wording to make your target look like an inhuman villain, it's easier to make the readers accept whatever the writer says. The writer then tries to sneakily shirk the responsibility to justify their claims. Just like at your quote:
> This is not good UX design. It is the opposite. It harms end-users. Revert the changes.
This wouldn't have passed my high school writing class. It's 3 arguments, 1 conclusion, and 0 evidence to support the conclusion. Instead of justifying their claims, people nowadays like to just throw out extreme words like "harm" and make it sound like Discord is installing keyloggers or something
For people like you and I, this is bad rhetoric - not well written or argued. But I feel like this is how the younger generations communicate and persuade with online messages. Be short, make bold claims, and make a call to action based on a sense of justice.
It should rub you the wrong way because the language is wrong! The author has used the wrong word to describe the problem. If you replace the word harm and harmful with difficult it makes sense.
harmful:
of a kind likely to be damaging
difficult:
hard to deal with, manage, or overcome
I've done it for everyone:
>Saturated dark colors against dark backgrounds are hard to read and difficult to parse
>White mentions lack visual clarity and are incredibly difficult for individuals with visual impairment
>Color redesign lacks contrast and are difficult for individuals who are colorblind and/or visually impaired
>Elements lack unity
>Saturated, mid-value colors covering large fields are difficult for end-users
"X elements are impossible for me to see because of Y condition" is a perfectly legitimate piece of feedback. "X element being the wrong color is causing catastrophic harm" is insane feedback. By using silly language, they are making themselves easy to ignore.
“Catastrophic harm” is a phrase you came up with. It’s fair to phrase accessibility concerns in terms of harm, because being denied access to something other people can use is a type of harm. “Catastrophic” is very common hyperbole for something you think is highly unfortunate.
I think it's easier to ignore when it comes across as typical internet flame war hysteria rather than someone trying to have a conversation about a issue
I'd like to think that, but this kind of rhetoric is becoming more and more common. People will utilize wild hyperbole, stretch the meaning of words, and declare that people are being harmed or oppressed as a call to action. I mean, at the end of the day this is about a user interface on a messaging app. But the post makes it sound like there is some willful negligence that borders on criminality.
But in a twisted way, maybe this kind of argument works. We are talking about it after-all.
It is disappointing to see that the comments here are dominated by tone policing and semantics. We ought to be able to look at the substance of the criticism and not get distracted by some of the word choices. The post makes several concrete claims in clear language that are worthy of discussion.
I use discord, I have a mild color anomaly in my vision, and have had problems reading low-contrast elements in the UI. Discord's update gives us a useful example of a major release that violates some dark mode design best practices.
> It is disappointing to see that the comments here are dominated by tone policing and semantics.
I agree, but I'm afraid the argument that the post is making is not based on a logical series of steps. It doesn't follow the typical convention of observation, problem, evidence, conclusion. The post is substantially an emotional outpouring and a call to action. This changes the dialectics.
If you're going to create a central claim that is solely Pathos based, the tone and semantics of how you do so become the most important thing in your argument and, to your point, this is why this post comes off so _wrong_. The post author failed at convincing this audience in large part because of their tone and semantics.
Accusations of tone policing are themselves tone policing, so there's disappointment all around. How we use language is important to plenty of people; there's a reason OP is the top comment.
There are indeed discussion-worthy claims in the post, and they're discussed elsewhere in the comments. Why hijack the top comment to change the subject?
Well, if we’re just talking about unwanted opinions, then a sighted person tone policing a visually impaired user rubs me the wrong way. What if they use discord to keep in touch with their family and the product is unusable to them now? Why do you care how emphatically someone expresses how they cannot even properly see the product in question anymore? Imagine stepping into a car and the windshield is completely painted over. You need it to go somewhere. You would be irate! Do you need someone else telling you “you aren’t saying how, specifically, it affects you?” or “why don’t you ask nicely?” Have a little sympathy and the problem is clear. Discord doesn’t need your sympathy. They have an obligation - possibly even a legal obligation - to keep their products accessible to their end users.
I agree that Discord should maintain accessibility in their products, and I can sympathize with how frustrating it is when services you rely on break.
I think we are in agreement here - this post is an emotionally charged person venting. I don't have any problem with that, but maybe there is a better way to vent than on the discord support page. If you want to actually effect change, this is not the way to do it.
What you're doing is called tone policing and it's not helpful. Would the post have gotten as much attention if the poster had been meek and polite? Probably not.
A person who uses Discord posting on the Discord forum about how the changes (in their opinion) make the product worse to use is not exactly a good comparison to a "bad tumblr post", unless what makes it a bad tumblr post is that it's a downer or you feel it doesn't meet your quality bar for Good Forum Content.
By my reckoning, the post clearly enumerates their complaints with the new design, it provides some references that they believe support their argument, and suggests a remedy (revert the design). There is no cursing in it and it does not contain any personal attacks. It doesn't contain any conspiracy theories or memes or sarcasm or other markers you might associate with "bad posts".
It's kind of baffling that you are willing to decide that the poster is some sort of tumblr reject based on not liking how they argue their points when you haven't even used the product.
> Also they don't "suggest" a remedy, they demand it
Would this post have been better if they said “it might be a good idea if you considered going back to the previous way?” I’m not sure how soft pedaling the ask makes it more reasonable.
The post is pretty clear in what is wrong and how to fix it. If anything Discord is the aggressor here with a forced change without an “use the old UI” button.
If the posts included screenshots to show how bad the UI change is that would have made it better. Maybe the support forum doesn’t allow it.
> White mentions lack visual clarity and are incredibly harmful to individuals with visual impairment
"Incredibly Harmful" is hyperbole, and for instance could be rewritten as:
> White mentions lack visual clarity and are hard for individuals with visual impairment to read.
Otherwise what does harmful mean? Here are some examples of things that I perceive as incredibly harmful:
* Huffing glue
* Stabbing yourself
* Lead poisoning
Not being able to read a mention without highlighting it, or selecting a different theme, probably doesn't quite class on the same level as these things, even if it should be fixed.
Similarly, Catastrophic means "involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering" - which isn't meant literally, it's hyperbole, but the problem with hyperbole is that writing containing can come across overly exaggerated and emotional.
I think it’s the “harmful” rhetoric that signals “I have an agenda”. We really need to get passed this charged way of conveying perfectly valid feedback. Because come on. It’s a chat app.
Of course they have an agenda. Discord is harder for them to use now, and they want it fixed. When did "agenda" become a negatively charged concept that only bad actors possess?
Slack and Teams are chat apps too. Why would chat apps not be important?
Using emotionally charged language is usually pretty off-putting. Some people are used to using emotionally charged language any time they feel some way, but I think that ends up wearing people down for when they hear it in the future. That's probably why you have so many people here commenting about the use of "harm".
Yeah, the phrase "cause harm" carries a lot of affect (e.g. urgency, impatience, panic, outrage, etc.). If we were to have a graph of common word usage and association, the words "cause harm" would be strongly linked with other phrases like
- morally repulsive
- life or death
- fix immediately
All of which is just one step away from the affect-saturated words like "hitler / mao / stalin", "genocide", etc.,
As such "cause harm" is one of those magical phrases in our common lexicon that has gained the power to turn an "is" to an "ought", and the author uses it as the logical glue to connect the relatively descriptive phrase of "This is not good UX design" to the proscription of "revert the changes"
But by using such an affect-laden phrase, the author is implicitly asking the reader to assign more weight to feelings (e.g. impatience, outrage, disgust, etc.,) and less weight to calculated executive thought.
This attempt through language to subvert the executive portion of our brain in favor of more primal processes makes me feel the whole article is suspect. After all, if the author's argument can be one that stands up to executive scrutiny, than what is the intention when the author attempts to by-pass executive scrutiny?
Yeah, I was wondering that, too. UX can cause harm, for example, certain kinds of contrast and lights for folks with epilepsy, but I'm not sure that the complaint here rises to that level.
If you can't use something, you could argue that it causes "harm" to your well being or job prospects or something.
But I agree that "harmful" should probably stick to more significant, mostly physical effects.
But, of course, here we are on HN discussing it, so it had its desired effect...
If Discord suddenly stopped working for me, while it wouldn't be catastrophic it would be quite bad. I use it as my main channel of communication with many contacts, and I use it for work. I have secondary contact channels for plenty of people (twitter, email, etc), but not all.
I can imagine a person having more of their life exist on Discord and if it suddenly became unusable for them due to these changes, it would be a catastrophe. Some people literally can't pay rent without Discord, since they use it to prepare content for work or to collaborate with their team.
I don't want to diminish any significant impact it may have on its users, just remarking on the language feeling a bit intense. Hopefully they take the complaints seriously.
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)
The word "harm" means many things. Just google "consumer harm", for example, and the top result is a government agency using the word harm to describe non-physical injury:
I miss the times before applications had their own theming and just used bog-standard OS provided widgets that could be themed globally by the user. That this has fallen out of favor is, in my opinion, a good indication of how unprofessional and user-hostile our industry has become.
We didn't use to need bespoke "dark modes", you just changed the colors globally. We did this in the 90s, when 64MB of ram was huge. We have become pathetic.
Everything nice and dark… except the web page content… at least back in the very early day before user style sheets and other workarounds became usable.
It's doubly annoying when you consider that apps like Discord that leverage web tech have a very capable themeing system built in to them via CSS and the user styles web standard.
Theming makes it really hard to update the software in any substantial way. Even the slightest change to the design could end up breaking themes, or being drawn as white text on white background, etc.
I think it’s natural that it was more common when auto-updating software wasn’t the norm.
Hm that's a good point. Some access to the theming would be nice though.
Old themes were heavily based on tailored graphics that can really not be adapted easily. But the problem at hand (UI that's hard to read for the visually impaired) could be addressed with at least some access to the theming.
That's something many programs still offer though.
Does anyone know which kind of websites and apps are required to implement accessibility?
I thought it was only government websites originally but then I looked it up and saw that it's a bit more than that. Is there a simple rule to know when I'm required to do this?
(I'm not looking for answers that say: you should always do it because it's a good thing to do. I want to know what the rules are.)
So, legally speaking, no website or app is _required_ by the Americans with Disabilites Act (ADA) to be made accessible. Title III of the ADA is the part that deals with public businesses and it doesn't mention digital services at all, but has been interpreted by various courts to include websites, there was a notable case against Dominos about this, wherein the judge ruled that Dominos did, in fact, have to make their online ordering tool fully accessible to people using screen readers, but this was the judge's understanding of the law and hasn't been challenged at a higher court. There's also section 508 of Title II of the ADA that does require government websites to be accessible, but it imposes no such requirements on private businesses. The DOJ apparently was considering a formal guidance on this a few years ago, but it never materialized.
Here's a quote from an article I'll link below, this article seems up to date with my knowledge of the matter and I think will help answer most of your questions. (Even if that answer is "lol, who knows"):
> ADA legislation as is applies to websites is currently a gray area. This often leaves the interpretation of the law up to the court where the lawsuit is filed, generally a state court. Suits have been filed in every state, though the majority of cases are in New York, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
>
> Do all websites have to be ADA compliant? That depends. Courts generally reach one of the following conclusions:
>
> Yes, a business website is considered a “public accommodation” and must be accessible.
> Yes, but only if the business also has a physical location that serves the public.
> No, the ADA does not specifically address websites and therefore does not apply.
So, the answer is that there are several good reasons to make your site and/or app accessible: You should do it because it's the right thing to do, it improves your ranking in google (a site that can be screen read can be mechanically crawled easier and is viewed favorably by Google's search algorithm), and there may come a day in the near future where it is mandated.
Honestly, I'd recommend reading through the WCAG standards sometime. It's a very well thought out document that lays out pretty straight forward approaches to making your digital content more accessible to users with a wide variety of disabilities. When people think 'accessibility' they often are only thinking about blind or vision impaired users, but there's so much more to it than that, and a lot of what you do as you build an app or site affects accessibility, whether you know it or not.
Dyslexic people have issues with some fonts, for instance, I don't think it's unreasonable to build your site in a way that lets the user override the font using their browser's settings. Or for people with limited motor control, placing frequently used together controls nearer to each other can improve both your UX and your accessibility for people with motor impairments.
I realize this isn't the easy, straightforward answer you wanted, but this is the reality of the situation.
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.
Yup, their contrast on a lot of elements is already way too low and this isn't helping. And light mode is honestly worse for accessibility on Discord because the vast majority of their base use dark mode and make choices for things that only work in dark mode. Like having a bright yellow for your username, it looks great against the dark grey background of dark mode, but is completely unreadable on the white background of light mode.
I understand the concerns here, but why is the goal to revert the changes? Discord's UI has relied on low contrast colors for a long time, especially for reacts and the code blocks. It feels like Discord was trying to improve accessibility not hurt it, and made poorly informed choices. Another tweak to the UI with these concerns in mind could be useful even for those without disabilities.
TBF their previous design isnt the pinnacle of readability either, it's basically 50 shades of grey (I use the web version only and haven't seen the new one yet). The audible beep seems to be always random. In general I think these chat interfaces are the worst kind of discussion boards we can have, but discord is free and still allows adult content so i guess its a compromise.
> ...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.
It's exactly the kind of demonizing language that has unfortunately become common in recent years. By using dishonest wording to make your target look like an inhuman villain, it's easier to make the readers accept whatever the writer says. The writer then tries to sneakily shirk the responsibility to justify their claims. Just like at your quote:
> This is not good UX design. It is the opposite. It harms end-users. Revert the changes.
This wouldn't have passed my high school writing class. It's 3 arguments, 1 conclusion, and 0 evidence to support the conclusion. Instead of justifying their claims, people nowadays like to just throw out extreme words like "harm" and make it sound like Discord is installing keyloggers or something
> It's exactly the kind of demonizing language that has unfortunately become common in recent years.
It reads like a thinly veiled “kids these days”.
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=27118267
Writing like this is meant not to persuade, but to incite and coerce using emotion.
Personally, I see it all the time on Twitter, and more broadly online in left-of-center political discussions.
harmful:
of a kind likely to be damaging
difficult:
hard to deal with, manage, or overcome
I've done it for everyone:
>Saturated dark colors against dark backgrounds are hard to read and difficult to parse
>White mentions lack visual clarity and are incredibly difficult for individuals with visual impairment
>Color redesign lacks contrast and are difficult for individuals who are colorblind and/or visually impaired
>Elements lack unity
>Saturated, mid-value colors covering large fields are difficult for end-users
>Text contrast with new colors fail the WCAG test
By toning back the language, you've made it sound like whining and not a legitimate concern. You make it easy to ignore.
But in a twisted way, maybe this kind of argument works. We are talking about it after-all.
I use discord, I have a mild color anomaly in my vision, and have had problems reading low-contrast elements in the UI. Discord's update gives us a useful example of a major release that violates some dark mode design best practices.
I agree, but I'm afraid the argument that the post is making is not based on a logical series of steps. It doesn't follow the typical convention of observation, problem, evidence, conclusion. The post is substantially an emotional outpouring and a call to action. This changes the dialectics.
If you're going to create a central claim that is solely Pathos based, the tone and semantics of how you do so become the most important thing in your argument and, to your point, this is why this post comes off so _wrong_. The post author failed at convincing this audience in large part because of their tone and semantics.
There are indeed discussion-worthy claims in the post, and they're discussed elsewhere in the comments. Why hijack the top comment to change the subject?
I think we are in agreement here - this post is an emotionally charged person venting. I don't have any problem with that, but maybe there is a better way to vent than on the discord support page. If you want to actually effect change, this is not the way to do it.
By my reckoning, the post clearly enumerates their complaints with the new design, it provides some references that they believe support their argument, and suggests a remedy (revert the design). There is no cursing in it and it does not contain any personal attacks. It doesn't contain any conspiracy theories or memes or sarcasm or other markers you might associate with "bad posts".
It's kind of baffling that you are willing to decide that the poster is some sort of tumblr reject based on not liking how they argue their points when you haven't even used the product.
Falling back on strong emotional language like actively harms is a crutch - unless well-supported by facts or reasoning.
Also they don't "suggest" a remedy, they demand it, and their demand is backed by their unsupported claim of "actively harms".
Would this post have been better if they said “it might be a good idea if you considered going back to the previous way?” I’m not sure how soft pedaling the ask makes it more reasonable.
The post is pretty clear in what is wrong and how to fix it. If anything Discord is the aggressor here with a forced change without an “use the old UI” button.
If the posts included screenshots to show how bad the UI change is that would have made it better. Maybe the support forum doesn’t allow it.
> White mentions lack visual clarity and are incredibly harmful to individuals with visual impairment
"Incredibly Harmful" is hyperbole, and for instance could be rewritten as:
> White mentions lack visual clarity and are hard for individuals with visual impairment to read.
Otherwise what does harmful mean? Here are some examples of things that I perceive as incredibly harmful:
* Huffing glue
* Stabbing yourself
* Lead poisoning
Not being able to read a mention without highlighting it, or selecting a different theme, probably doesn't quite class on the same level as these things, even if it should be fixed.
Similarly, Catastrophic means "involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering" - which isn't meant literally, it's hyperbole, but the problem with hyperbole is that writing containing can come across overly exaggerated and emotional.
And seriously? "Aggressor"? It's not an attack, for god's sake.
Slack and Teams are chat apps too. Why would chat apps not be important?
That’s a bad faith interpretation. So not presenting that as irrefutable fact.
Seriously, what is it to be actively ableist as opposed to passively ableist? Are words just emotional signifiers now?
Exaggeration has become the bare minimum for getting your point across.
EDIT: don't get me started on "blatantly"
- morally repulsive
- life or death
- fix immediately
All of which is just one step away from the affect-saturated words like "hitler / mao / stalin", "genocide", etc.,
As such "cause harm" is one of those magical phrases in our common lexicon that has gained the power to turn an "is" to an "ought", and the author uses it as the logical glue to connect the relatively descriptive phrase of "This is not good UX design" to the proscription of "revert the changes"
But by using such an affect-laden phrase, the author is implicitly asking the reader to assign more weight to feelings (e.g. impatience, outrage, disgust, etc.,) and less weight to calculated executive thought.
This attempt through language to subvert the executive portion of our brain in favor of more primal processes makes me feel the whole article is suspect. After all, if the author's argument can be one that stands up to executive scrutiny, than what is the intention when the author attempts to by-pass executive scrutiny?
If you can't use something, you could argue that it causes "harm" to your well being or job prospects or something.
But I agree that "harmful" should probably stick to more significant, mostly physical effects.
But, of course, here we are on HN discussing it, so it had its desired effect...
https://www.etymonline.com/word/harm
I can imagine a person having more of their life exist on Discord and if it suddenly became unusable for them due to these changes, it would be a catastrophe. Some people literally can't pay rent without Discord, since they use it to prepare content for work or to collaborate with their team.
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)
Nobody is inflicting any harm by choosing a bad color palette.
https://www.fdic.gov/resources/supervision-and-examinations/...
I don't have terribly good eyes, but I'm happy to say I don't feel like I've suffured permanent eye damage from the discord UI :]
When OP says incredibly harmful and catastrophic I think they're just describing their feelings and how important it is to them.
WinAmp, MySpace, even my Nokia 6300 had themes. I never understood why this trend didn't stay and become more popular.
We didn't use to need bespoke "dark modes", you just changed the colors globally. We did this in the 90s, when 64MB of ram was huge. We have become pathetic.
And WinAmp was kind of famous for its themes. If well done, they didn't look amateurish at all. Even better than the original.
But it's true that currently most UIs that don't look like all the others quickly seem half-baked.
Anyway, having even a little theme support in popular programs would fix issues like the posted one easily.
I doubt discord would have got influencers and musicians creating communities on it if it looked like xfire
I think it’s natural that it was more common when auto-updating software wasn’t the norm.
Old themes were heavily based on tailored graphics that can really not be adapted easily. But the problem at hand (UI that's hard to read for the visually impaired) could be addressed with at least some access to the theming.
That's something many programs still offer though.
I thought it was only government websites originally but then I looked it up and saw that it's a bit more than that. Is there a simple rule to know when I'm required to do this?
(I'm not looking for answers that say: you should always do it because it's a good thing to do. I want to know what the rules are.)
Here's a quote from an article I'll link below, this article seems up to date with my knowledge of the matter and I think will help answer most of your questions. (Even if that answer is "lol, who knows"):
> ADA legislation as is applies to websites is currently a gray area. This often leaves the interpretation of the law up to the court where the lawsuit is filed, generally a state court. Suits have been filed in every state, though the majority of cases are in New York, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. > > Do all websites have to be ADA compliant? That depends. Courts generally reach one of the following conclusions: > > Yes, a business website is considered a “public accommodation” and must be accessible. > Yes, but only if the business also has a physical location that serves the public. > No, the ADA does not specifically address websites and therefore does not apply.
https://www.accessiblemetrics.com/blog/do-all-websites-have-...
So, the answer is that there are several good reasons to make your site and/or app accessible: You should do it because it's the right thing to do, it improves your ranking in google (a site that can be screen read can be mechanically crawled easier and is viewed favorably by Google's search algorithm), and there may come a day in the near future where it is mandated.
Honestly, I'd recommend reading through the WCAG standards sometime. It's a very well thought out document that lays out pretty straight forward approaches to making your digital content more accessible to users with a wide variety of disabilities. When people think 'accessibility' they often are only thinking about blind or vision impaired users, but there's so much more to it than that, and a lot of what you do as you build an app or site affects accessibility, whether you know it or not.
Dyslexic people have issues with some fonts, for instance, I don't think it's unreasonable to build your site in a way that lets the user override the font using their browser's settings. Or for people with limited motor control, placing frequently used together controls nearer to each other can improve both your UX and your accessibility for people with motor impairments.
I realize this isn't the easy, straightforward answer you wanted, but this is the reality of the situation.
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.
Everyone's riding this dark mode train but it literally makes things worse sometimes when the colors don't contrast well.
[0]: https://youtu.be/B4wUsDozedE
https://xkcd.com/1576/