Hello,

As a blind gamer I truly love what I can do here on DNDBeyond and very much enjoy being able to game without any real barriers between myself and other gamers.

I did want to bring one issue I have with the character builder though.  The main reason I wish to bring this up is that I have been told that Internet Explorer is not really a supported browser on your site, and that I should move to using one of the more up-to-date options out there.

The issue is that the only browser that actually works, as far as a blind person is concerned, is IE.  The reason for this is that, in the Character Builder, there are pop-up items that have to be selected to be able to generate a character.  The main places are in the race selection, class selection, and when leveling your character.  there are others, such as when selecting XP vs Milestone, but those are not as hard to live without selecting.

If I try to select a race or class with Chrome, 

Edge, or Firefox, I cannot do it.  With IE I can get to the text and use a command to click on it using my screen reader, but there is simply no way I have found to do it in any of the other browsers I have listed.

Is there any way we can get this fixed.  I worry that, if IE truly is unsupported, it might eventually mean myself, and other blind players, won't be able to make use of one of the biggest features on your site.

Thank you.

You really shouldn't be using IE at all. Even Microsoft (the developers) have said as much. I didn't follow the story closely, because I stopped using IE many years ago, but I heard that a security exploit was made public that made it easy to steal user info.

Even more of a reason the issues I mentioned need a resolution for blind players.

How are you accessing the site? Is it through a braille terminal or are you just using a screen-reader?

In both cases Firefox comes highly recommended. It works well with screen-readers like NVDA. There is also an extension called MozBraille that transforms Firefox into a browser that can be used with a braille terminal, also offers some text-speech software as well as a big-characters view.

There are a lot more extensions and applications that can work with Firefox whether your blindness is partial-sighted, colour-blindness or complete blindness. There are also similar options for Chrome although I haven't looked into that much, since I don't like the browser.

Internet Explorer actually has less options than other browsers, given it's disbanded development and lack of security - even before Microsoft abandoned it.

This site will probably never be updated to work better with Internet Explorer due to those security concerns, it's lack of support and the fact it sucked balls even before it's gaping security flaws were made public.

Since there are more accessibility options for Firefox and Chrome, which work better than anything ever made for Internet Explorer, and do work well with this website - I can only recommended using them. Since I abhor Chrome's sneakiness in feeding your private data to Google no matter what options or preferences you pick, my personal preference is Firefox. Perhaps there may be something on the site that is not compatible with any accessibility software, in which case that should be looked into. However, it's still not a reason to stick with a browser that greatly compromises your security - given the alternative and superior options available.

Then will you answer a question?  How do you get past the pop-ups for character building with chrome or firefox.  I have not found a way to do so.

I do use a screen reader, JAWS in particular.  The only way I have found to get past those popups is to use the JAWS Cursor, if you know anything about the screen reader I am using, and to do a click on the popup button to accept the change I wish to make.

From your response above it seems you have a way to do so with either Chrome or Firefox, so please explain your method for doing so.

Thanks.

You do know JAWS is available for Firefox, right?

Sorry, but I feel like you are missing the entire topic of this forum.  I do know JAWS works with firefox and have tried it.  The issue I brought up is the specific issue with popups in the character builder.  If you have a way that those popups can be activated using JAWS, in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge, I would like you to let me know.  Otherwise I will wait for feedback from the DND Beyond staff on this issue.

Yes I agree with this. After hearing about the accessibility here I wanted to bring a campaign here. Using chrome I tried making a character but could not complete even the first step for character building. The campaign tool seems to be accessible and I really like the monster search feature for creating battles. Please help us blind players out by fixing the way character creation interacts with our screen readers. If this is fixed and I can use beyond, I do not mind buying books and other tools to support you and also bringing all my blind frineds here so we can game. Thanks for all the work so far.

Yeah, I too am a blind D&D player and it would be extremely nice to have the character creation portion of this site fixed to work with screen readers. I use NVDA and when I click on a race, a window pops up that is essentially blank for me. None of the cursor keys do anything. There is nothing to click on. There is no way to progress.

There's a full Discord server of blind gamers that would rejoice at being able to use D&D Beyond's character creation tool, but we can't.

Right now, we enjoy being able to purchase and use accessible material on D&D Beyond, but without the help of the website managers taking accessibility seriously, there's a gigantic portion of this site we can't take advantage of without sighted assistance.

Please at least give us some hope for the future by responding to this topic. We will be happy to help in any way we can.