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Comment by ctoth

8 days ago

I'm a screen reader user and CTO of an accessibility company. This change doesn't reduce noise for me. It removes functionality.

Sighted users lost convenience. I lost the ability to trust the tool. There is no "glancing" at terminal output with a screen reader. There is no "progressive disclosure." The text is either spoken to me or it doesn't exist.

When you collapse file paths into "Read 3 files," I have no way to know what the agent is doing with my codebase without switching to verbose mode, which then dumps subagent transcripts, thinking traces, and full file contents into my audio stream. A sighted user can visually skip past that. I listen to every line sequentially.

You've created a situation where my options are "no information" or "all information." The middle ground that existed before, inline file paths and search patterns, was the accessible one.

This is not a power user preference. This is a basic accessibility regression. The fix is what everyone in this thread has been asking for: a BASIC BLOODY config flag to show file paths and search patterns inline. Not verbose mode surgery. A boolean.

Please just add the option.

And yes, I rewrote this with Claude to tone my anger and frustration down about 15 clicks from how I actually feel.

20 comments

ctoth

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duncangh  7 days ago

Dyslexic and also a prolific screen reader user myself. +1 and thank you for mentioning something that often gets (ironically) overlooked

wahnfrieden  8 days ago

Try Codex instead. Much greener pastures overall

  • ctoth  8 days ago

    I do love my subagents and I wrote an entire Claude Code audio hook system for a11y but this would be still rather compelling if Codex weren't also somewhat of an a11y nightmare. It does some weird thing with ... maybe terminal repaints or something else that ends up rereading the same text over and over. Claude Code does this similarly but Codex ends up reading like ... all the weird symbols and other stuff? window decorations? and not just the text like CC does. They are both hellish but CC slightly? less so... until now.

    • TonyStr  8 days ago

      Sorry for being off-topic, but isn't a11y a rather ironic term for accessibility? It uses a very uncommon abbreviation type -- numeronym, and doesn't mean anything to the reader unless they look it up (or already know what it means).

      1 reply →

    • wahnfrieden  8 days ago

      Is it as bad with the Codex app, or VS Code plugin?

      They are much more responsive on GitHub issues than Anthropic so you could also try reporting your issue there

bcherny  8 days ago

Hey -- we take accessibility seriously, and want Claude Code to work well for you. This is why we have repurposed verbose mode to do what you want, without the other verbose output. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

  • lanyard-textile  8 days ago

    It's well meaning but I think this goes against something like the curb effect. Not a perfect analogy but, verbosity is something you have to opt into here: Everyone benefits from being able to glance at what the agent is up to by default. Nobody greatly benefits from the agent being quiet by default.

    If people find it too noisy, they can use the flag or toggle that makes everything quieter.

    p.s. Serendipitously I just finished my on-site at anthropic today, hi :)

  • ctoth  8 days ago

    > we take accessibility seriously

    Do you guys have a screen reader user on the dev team?

    Is verbose mode the same as the old mode, where only file paths are spoken? Or does it have other text in it? Because I tried to articulate, and may have failed. More text is usually bad for me. It must be consumed linearly. I need specific text.

    Quality over quantity