[Accessibility-testing] Making some test games

Jason McIntosh jmac at jmac.org
Wed Apr 4 21:50:01 EDT 2018


All,

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve contacted the three proposed tech leaders (Zarf, Furkle, Dan) in private email, and also checked in with the rest of the committee (all accessibility experts) as a group. We seem to all be in agreement about next steps! Some have voiced concern about scheduling and availability, but so long as we can roll this project with some reasonably dependable momentum, I won’t be one to insist on any particularly aggressive schedule.

Here’s what I’d like to do next:

• I will get in touch with the tech leads again and for each, set up a schedule for their slice of the project that works for them.

	• The three groups don’t have to have identical schedules! In fact, if they end up a bit staggered, that’s okay, and might even encourage more cross-team inspiration.

	• Each schedule will involve regular check-ins — biweekly, perhaps — where the leads report their recent progress and next goals, and discuss any current issues.

• The initial composition of the “sub groups” are, in fact, identical: it’s simply this whole committee, but with a different person leading each group. As they work towards their goals, they should feel free to use this mailing list to ask specific questions of the accessibility experts we conveniently have already gathered here — it’s very likely that any such question asked would be relevant to all the platform-specific groups’ work.

  Certainly, any tech lead can also reach out to the wider community for additional expertise or volunteer assistance. If you end up working with a volunteer whose presence on the Slack would be helpful, please let me know— I consider Slack membership pretty loosely open to all IFTF volunteers, and just just named committee members.

• I will have an “office hour” on the Slack’s #a11y channel every Monday evening, from 8 to 9 PM Eastern time. I am of course on the Slack most of the time *anyway*, but I hereby set this as an hour I’ll always be immediately available to text-chat about this project. I am going to start this right away, as of this coming Monday, April 9. I encourage y’all to visit whenever Monday evening sees you with something you’d like to discuss at chat-speed.
	
    Naturally, I am always available for private conversation! But the Slack can be helpful if you want to discuss stuff in a channel with a permanent backlog that others on the committee (as well as other interested IFTF volunteers) can see, and perhaps respond to asynchronously.

So, that’s the plan… early comments welcome as always. Other than that, I will proceed to continue my already-in-progress conversations with the tech leads.

(As an aside, I wrote a public blog post about our current project status: http://blog.iftechfoundation.org/2018-04-01-accessibility-testing-update-spring-2018.html)

> On Mar 23, 2018, at 6:38 PM, Jason McIntosh <jmac at jmac.org> wrote:
> 
> Hullo IF-accessibility team,
> 
> Thanks for your collective patience while I settled into my new home and office and so on. There are boxes still to unpack, but I have a cleared-off desktop and I have learned where all the nearest coffee shops are, and therefore ready to carry on where we left off.
> 
> Per our conversation on this list from earlier this month, I’d like to proceed with the creation of three small working groups to create three small test games, each of which will serve as an accessibility “obstacle course” for a single IF development system: Inform, Twine, or ChoiceScript.
> 
> Now, *it so happens* that three people on this committee include an Inform expert, a Twine expert, and a ChoiceScript expert, respectively. The rest of the team are accessibility experts. I dare say that a certain order of who should lead which efforts, and who will support them in these efforts, asserts itself. Never one to make assumptions, though, I’m going to follow up this email by reaching out to the IF-system experts in private mail just to make sure everyone’s thinking what I’m thinking — and, more to the point, has the time to help build something over the next couple of months.
> 
> My expectation of each group is the same (and I’m open to thoughts on editing this list):
> 
> * A playable test game.
> 
> * A survey for accessibility-testing players of the test game to fill out, after playing it.
> 
> * Source for the test game.
> 
> * A list of the accessibility challenges that the game exercises, and where and how it exercises them. (This includes those informed by WCAG level 1, by screen-reader specificities, and by IF-system use-expectations.)
> 
> * A “methods” document of why these tests were chosen for this system.
> 
> Teams can of course have overlapping membership, and can recruit additional volunteers from outside the committee; whatever is needed to produce the items in the above list (or whatever the above list might mutate into after y’all course-correct me).
> 
> I acknowledge I’m writing this on a Friday evening, so I’m gonna tie this off here and ping the language experts now. Will follow up next week, and please do follow up yourselves with in-the-meantime thoughts if you have any.




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