Skip to main content


Question for #blind folks: How accessible is #TikTok now, on any platform?
in reply to Matt Campbell

Can't stand it, never will. Can't see the point if it's videos lasting seconds, it will always be youtube, the videos and playlists portions of it for me at least, not the shorts, which is what TikTok is practically if I'm not mistaken.
in reply to Matt Campbell

Sorry to be harsh, it's just how I come across sometimes. I have only heard of TikTok being for videos practically seconds to a minute long and even I thought what's the point in that for a V.I or blind person? I'd rather myself hear somebody in the video describing what is going on rather than a seconds or minute long video with just music or no sound in it.
in reply to Matt Campbell

I typically don't quote, but this literarly came up last week and I gave a long response with some tips so I'll just link to that post dragonscave.space/@pitermach/1…


I just started using it last week so there may very well be other things I may not be aware of, the app is kind of garbage but here’s some things I found out about to make it easier. Firstly in the accessibility settings there’s an option to display some additional buttons if VoiceOver is on, you obviously want that turned on which it already started out being for me. That adds a bunch of buttons running down the right middle of the screen to like, follow, read comments and so on, as well as previous and next buttons at the top as an alternative to manual scrolling. By far the biggest annoyance to be aware of is that for some reason with VoiceOver on when you touch some parts of the screen or do some actions that cause a screen change like following someone or opening the sharing screen, it’ll scroll you back to the top of your feed unless you’re holding your finger down to prevent the focus from moving. This is why so many people prefer to scroll with VoiceOver on, which isn’t as bad as it sounds because the video takes up nearly the whole screen. With VO off, single tapping the video pauses, while double-tapping likes it which is accompanied by a haptic. Then if you want to do anything else you turn on VO then immediately start touching the screen where the buttons are so it doesn’t scroll you to the top. For the website, which in some ways is better, there are 2 decent ways to browse the feed. One is just going by graphic which will automatically play the video and the buttons to like and so on will be immediately below, or an even better way is to open the comments view from any video, find the dialog that pops up and then scroll with either down/up or the next and previous buttons. The advantage to doing it this way is you can also rewind and fast forward the video with right/left arrows and you have immediate access to comments.

Hope this helps. I got a lot of this from @talon who’s been using it for a lot longer than me.


in reply to Matt Campbell

iOS is doable, as long as you explore by touch instead of swiping.

There's one very interesting bug when swiping where it moves you to the top of your feed, even though nothing but the current video is visible on the screen. I don't know how or why it does this, but both Spotify and Youtube Music had similar problems where they would skip tracks when swiping, so VO must be sending some kind of accessibility event that apps misinterpret.

There's probably a horrific abuse of some iOS api or other in there somewhere, just like that old RTL hack that broke VO navigation.

in reply to Matt Campbell

I don't have an account, but a friend sometimes sends me links to TikTok content. I'll freely admit that finding the play button, realising the video is muted by default, finding the unmute control, and working out how to rewind it is such a pain on the web that most of the time, I just don't bother clicking them. Most of the playback controls don't have accessible roles, let alone names, so it's a "guess which blank I should press Enter on" sort of game. You can forget about doing that in Safari on iOS.
in reply to Matt Campbell

Its okay, but nothing more. Some things are still weird labeled, and I wouldn't say its anyhow fun to use the app with voice over, but if you turn it off for scralling and use double tabs for liking its all right. Depends what you want to do. Speaking of IOS btw.
in reply to Matt Campbell

i'm able to use it on android. streaming live, beeing a guest in other's live, like, and comment. i'm not sure why others are finding it difficult. as long as you will label the buttons, it's good