Discord Features Everyone Should Know About

Discord isn’t just for gamers anymore – it’s becoming a haven for communities that are being squeezed out of other platforms like Slack and even Instagram. The free Discord plan gives you enough power to manage a large community with moderation, rules, and more. But one thing that Discord sucks at is the user interface: Discord’s use case may have evolved, but the interface is still stuck in the world of gamers. If dark backgrounds, auto-playing emojis, animations, and small text annoy you, here are the accessibility settings you can tweak to make Discord a lot more pleasing to the eye.

Discord has a separate “Accessibility” section in Settings, but smaller quality of life features are spread throughout their Settings app.

Start with Discord’s accessibility settings.

Click the gear icon in the Discord app to open Settings . In the sidebar, select Accessibility. Here are the settings you should change:

  • Saturation : Reduce the color saturation for UI elements, making them much cooler.
  • Role Colors : You can choose not to display role colors at all if you wish.
  • Enable Motion Reduction : Take care of all animations with this toggle. When you enable this feature, Discord will also automatically disable GIF playback when the GIF is in focus, as well as disable animated emoji.
  • Stickers : Choose the ” Never animate ” option for stickers and thank us later.

Setting the background and text size

Next on the accessibility tour is the Appearance section in Settings .

  • Theme : If you don’t like the dark background, switch to the ” Light ” option for the theme. “Sync to Computer” or “Automatic” are good options for those who want their Discord app to automatically match their current system theme.
  • Dark Sidebar : Enable this feature to keep the sidebar in dark mode when the rest of Discord has a light theme. This setting will help Slack users feel at home.
  • Message Display : Make sure it’s set to Cozy so the threads are roomier.
  • Chat font scaling : Here you will be able to fine-tune the text size, the spacing between message groups, and the overall zoom level. Magnify everything by at least 20% to make it easier to read, even if you don’t have vision problems. 18px font size and 110% zoom level works best for me.

Choose how text and images are displayed

Go to the Text & Images section to customize how Discord handles images, links, and automatically embedded media. If you don’t want to see images, videos, and lolcats, you can disable the ” When Posting as Links in Chat ” feature to turn off previews.

If you have vision problems, we recommend that you enable the ” With image descriptions ” option. This will provide a description of the image hosted on the Discord server. In the Embedding Preview and Links section, you can disable media embedding completely.

Manage voice and video settings

Finally, go to the ” Voice and Video ” section. Discord has a Voice Activity feature that will automatically unmute you when you speak. You can adjust the input sensitivity with the slider if you think Discord is picking up your voice when you didn’t intend to. But if you find this too troublesome, try switching to the ” Push to Talk ” option, which turns on the sound when you press a keyboard shortcut.

In advanced settings, you can turn on features like ” Noise Cancellation”, ” Echo Cancellation ” and ” Noise Cancellation” to improve your voice chats.

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