Since this isn’t about a specific product, OS or app, figured this would be the right place to share my general thoughts. Has anyone noticed, especially in the past year or so, a concerning general decline and screen reader accessibility? I’m talking apps, websites, just overall. I’m talking about things like more inaccessible elements on websites, regressions in apps that were previously more accessible, less responsiveness from companies and developers when screen reader accessibility feedback is provided, etc.
On one hand, devices, operating systems, apps and websites are constantly changing, doing more sophisticated things etc., so that could partially explain it. On the other, though, I kind of worry in the current winner-takes-all profit-driven tech environment of our present day, and with less regulatory pressure in some places to ensure accessibility, it’s something worse – the beginning of a larger corrosion of accessibility focus more broadly. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I was just curious if anyone else has noticed this trend, and if so, what do you think is going on?
A couple of immediate examples, just to ground this in some specific examples YouTube – in your recommendations feed, when you choose to indicate “not interested“ using the rotor options, a panel would pop up that would allow you to specify the reason, “I don’t like the video“ or “I’ve already watched the video.“ Now that panel is inaccessible, and though it can be reached using OCR, to me that’s still broken. Then, Uber Eats – most of the controls for rating a Delivered order, including giving the restaurant a star rating, and the labeling for giving the driver a thumbs up or thumbs down, is no longer accessible. Also with Uber Eats, when you go through the help screens if something went wrong with your order, the labels of the different options – wrong items, order was late, problem with driver, etc. all just get verbalized as “list item“ now, again forcing the use of OCR to make any sense of them. Even in iOS itself, it seems like text boxes, buttons and other standard UI elements are harder and harder to find, like they are shrinking in size or something, to wear I find myself really fumbling around with my thumbs just trying to find the input box to type an iMessage now.
By Justin_B, 14 June, 2026
Forum
Accessibility Advocacy
Comments
Yes, I have experienced this
Yes, I remember back in the older days, a lot of apps used to be so much more accessible. Now, accessibility is not really being thought of much. Here's an example: for a smart home company, their app was not accessible. There were many unlabeled buttons and elements that were just not accessible. I emailed their support team, and they just simply replied with, "Thank you for emailing us. We are very sorry for these specific issues you mentioned. We will be forwarding this to the developer team." Then just complete silence. There is nothing.
Yes, I have experience with that, and I also feel like platforms such as YouTube and Instagram are also getting less accessible. When they make a new feature accessible, it breaks another feature, and I feel like the cycle just continues.
It is the way of the world
It's not the last year, more like tides and waves always moving in and out of accessibility.
I'll spare you all the "back in the day" and "I remember when."
It's probably always going to be an ongoing battle between new things and getting new tools to deal with them, or workarounds. There's things I had to wait forty years to do because it took that long for AI to ripen from its roots in ancient technology, and science fiction dreams. But then Seeing AI stopped working in one of its functions for a few days, and it ground all that to a halt until I found workarounds, then it started working for me again. Way of life...
Most definitely
I have said before that it's been very frustrating to encounter accessibility barriers in all walks of life that were not here just five years ago, and I can lay the blame for this on tech largely, but also the kind of greed that has corporations cutting staff so you can never find a live human when you need one.
I am concerned that this year especially with the rise of vibe coding, we're seeing a lot more breakage of basic things that us screen reader users rely on. As of right now Discord's text box is broken with Voiceover, the whole thing the app revolves around. How do you break something that basic? And I can think of constant new examples that arise everywhere lately. I hope people figure out their priorities again soon and put some effort into fixing the messes they keep making.
Re: Discord
I am wondering if anyone has tried discord on the iOS 27 beta? Because, that bug mentioned above does not affect my primary iPhone, which is still running iOS 18.7.8, with the latest build of discord. 🤷
Yes I have
Yes I have. Accessibility is an ongoing battle. The endless cycle of checking and rechecking... It will never be completely perfect. I have to agree with old bear about it being the way of the world.
Totally agree.
And if you try to call the company, it's so difficult to reach a live person. And even when you think you have, it's an AI voice.
I have
same here
On the brighter side
On the brighter side, we now have AI-powered add-ons that have transformed the way blind and visually impaired people access printed information. Remember the days when we had to rely on applications such as ABBYY FineReader, Readiris, or OmniPage just to extract a small piece of text from a paper letter or read a few pages of study material? The process was often slow, cumbersome, and far from perfect.
Today, these capabilities are readily available through AI-integrated screen readers and accessibility tools. Printed documents, photographs, screenshots, PDFs, and even complex layouts can be recognized with remarkable accuracy in a matter of seconds. Beyond simple text recognition, AI can summarize lengthy documents, explain charts and images, answer questions about content, describe visual elements, and even help users navigate information more efficiently.
What once required specialized software, multiple processing steps, and considerable patience can now be achieved almost instantly. For many blind users, AI has not merely improved access to information—it has fundamentally changed the way information is consumed, studied, and interacted with, opening up possibilities that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago.
About AI…
First, that “on the bright side“ Reply looked like it itself was generated by AI, but I will take the Reply in good faith and address it. BTW, this is also another entire topic of discussion which is probably beyond the scope of this thread. Yes, AI is highly capable for helping Blind people with those things, but there’s, in my opinion, a massive trade-off that I think most of the Blind community is not fully recognizing nor appreciating. All that stuff you send – those personal documents, credit cards, photos, whatever you are uploading to ChatGPT or some other tool that uses commercial language models, is going to a server where you have no control over what happens with it. I still choose to use some of those I guess comparably old-fashioned tools simply because they either process the information on the device or their leveraging an existing service that the Blind community has known and trusted for years. I don’t love the idea of my most personal documents or details going into an OpenAI, anthropic or Google server where we have no idea who can access it, how it might be shared with others, if it gets sold to data brokers, if it accidentally ends up in their training models etc. etc. That’s just me though. Everybody has to decide on their own comfort level with these risks.
personally, AI is great,
AI has changed a lot about how people who are blind consoom information. i personally, am willing to trade my personal information for accessible content. really, so much is online all ready, and sites like Facebook, , , X, etc have so much of it, and you don't hear anyone voicing discontent with the information those sites have on you. they know, in the case of facebook, where you live, what your interests are, who you are friends with in real life, through algorithms, where you grew up, Ai is an obvious conclusion of what social media has been doing for years.
I tend to say
If everybody is spied on, nobody is spied on, while not minimyzing the actual risk and morally supporting things like STF in Europe and more.