An accessibility review of the new Medium site

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

At the beginning of February, Medium launched a new format.

I have highlighted Medium’s lack of concern over severe accessibility problems in a previous article and many LinkedIn posts and private messages to people who work for Medium. These issues entirely block authors who use assistive technology from independently and equally participating on the Medium platform. Medium has never really made any authentic effort at including authors or readers with disabilities other than an incomplete attempt at allowing for image descriptions. I know Medium employees who are UX team members have read my articles, because I’ve talked to them about the contents! Lack of knowledge of the extent of the issue is most definitely not the problem here.

I didn’t think Medium’s accessibility could get worse.

Unfortunately, it got WAY worse.

As an assistive technology user, the experience is just flat-out awful, bordering on some of the worst I have ever seen. This is an even stronger statement when you remember I’ve seen some pretty atrocious experiences in my eighteen years working in disability inclusion and accessibility. I only manage to work around Medium’s lack of accessibility by authoring my articles in Word in a very specialized way. This approach includes avoiding formatting and elements that Medium doesn’t support, such as tables, colored text, and header hierarchy greater than two levels. Then I dump them in Medium, tweak them, then publish. Sometimes I pay my virtual assistant to tweak them for me because it’s too much of an accessibility headache for me to want to deal with sometimes.

The *only* reason I use Medium is they have mastered providing authors with an easy mechanism to monetize blogging.

Medium has managed to screw even that up with a new “related” feature…