Reddit to roll out new accessibility updates

San Francisco Social discussion platform Reddit is bringing new accessibility updates for moderators, starting next month.

"We are committed to making it easy for mods using assistive technology to moderate using Reddit’s iOS and Android apps," u/joyventure, Director of Product at Reddit focused on accessibility and the performance, stability and quality of the web, iOS and Android platforms, said in a post.

"We’ve been talking with moderators who use assistive tech and/or moderate accessibility communities to hear their feedback and concerns about the tooling needs of mods and users."

By July 1, accessibility improvements will be coming to-- How mods access Moderation tools, ModQueue (view, action posts and comments, filter and sort content, add removal reasons, and bulk action items), ModMail (inbox, read, reply to messages, create new mail, private mod note) and User Settings (manage mods, approved users, muted users, banned user). Accessibility improvements in Community Settings, Ban Evasion Settings and Additional User Settings will roll out in late July. In August, improvements in the remaining mod surfaces will come.

"Thank you to all the mods who have taken the time to talk with us about accessibility and continue to share feedback, we’ll continue these regular discussions," the post mentioned. "We will share more updates on our progress next Friday (and hopefully not at 5pm PT for all of our sakes). We wanted to get this update out to you as soon as possible."

Last week, many subreddits adopted alternative forms of protest as Reddit threatened to take action against moderators. The social discussion platform stated that moderators must keep the community open. Additionally, they require a vote from their community before deciding to go dark. Moderators even received messages from the platform warning them that they would be removed if they all continued to contribute to the blackout.