Explicit Comment Hierarchy Indicators on Dreamwidth

[boundbooks]

The 21 October 2011 post at dw_news has a section about a change in Dreamwidth's code that I thought would be very relevant for this community:

As of the last code push, some of you may have already noticed a major accessibility improvement: explicit comment hierarchy indicators...You can now go to the Display tab of Account Settings and check "Display Explicit Comment Hierarchy Indicators (site scheme only)".

If you turn on this option, when viewing comment pages in any site skin, comments will then display an outline-style explicit numbering of comment threads, allowing people who access the site via screenreader and non-graphical browser to see the relationships of comments inside a comment thread. (It will look sort of like a content outline: 0, 1, 1a, 1b, 1b1, 1b2, 1c, 1c1, etc.)

This is a major accessibility win -- one of my screenreader-using friends didn't realize until after using LJ and then DW for about five years how sighted people were figuring out which comments were replies to which...

The news post also mentioned general accessibility needs on DW:

If you have an accessibility need that isn't being met, we want to hear about it. Because accessibility needs are different for everybody, and sometimes mutually-exclusive, we might not be able to fix the issue perfectly, but we will do our best to figure out a solution that will work for you. To notify us, you can post an entry to dw_accessibility, or contact the accessibility team project coordinator, rb.