I once read a comment on Reddit that said that the chained Bible was one of many things that led Martin Luther to lead the Protestant Reformation. The person who made that comment offered no sources and their comment seems a bit too polemical, so I would like to hear an expert's opinion on this.
Were chained Bibles in the Middle Ages one of the many issues that lead to the Reformation?
In short... No. While a Bible chained to a lectern is a common image today of Medieval times, I don't know how much it was literal. Sometimes it was, but it's used to illustrate how copies of the Bible were indeed relatively rare and expensive, but the simple fact that any copy may possibly have been chained was of negligible importance.
Luther's initial protest in the 95 Theses in 1517 were against abuses in the practice of indulgences, and the questions quickly expanded to include church/papal authority, the nature of salvation in faith alone or by faith plus good works, and other practices in how Mass was conducted, whether priests had to be celibate, etc. Luther's translation of the Bible into vernacular language instead of Latin was an important step in helping spread his ideas, for example in sola Scriptura, the authority of Scripture trumping the authority of the Pope -- but it was the printing press that helped make Bibles more affordable and common.
The main cause of the Reformation was moral corruption in the Medieval Western Church, problems fairly widely recognized at the time (including by Erasmus and other non-Reformation humanist scholars), and according to Luther and his compatriots, also the underlying theological problems. Bibles chained to lecterns was, at the very most, nothing more than one symptom among many of the issues at hand.