[Accessibility-testing] Notes & minutes of the April 30, 2018 meeting

[Jason McIntosh]

Howdy all! Hope these notes are useful (and accurate). Please chime in if I forgot anything, or got any details wrong.

Present: jmac, zarf, furkle, Austin, Zack, Mark, Deborah

* Punted the question of updating the schedule for a couple of weeks. We're *technically* not behind yet, ha ha?!

* Preliminary discussion of testing, once "Cloak of Access" is developed

    * Mark told us about Player Panels, a new AbleGamers program
        * http://www.ablegamers.org/player-panels/
        * AbleGamers called for volunteers to form a pool of gamers with disabilities, willing to be called on to help creators and publishers with game accessibility.
        * Hoped for a modest response, got a *huge* response, and there is a pool of hundreds of eager potential testers now.
        * Mark can help use this resource when we're ready to start recruiting testers!
    
    * Zack reiterates ability to trawl his own social network of AT users as well.
        
    * Discussion of which Inform (Z-code/Glulx) interpreters we should subject to testing
        * All agree that we should focus on terps that are under active maintenance
            * In other words, interpreters that are likely to actually improve should we deliver a report of suggested improvements!
        * ACTION ITEM: We need to draft a list of interpreters we plan to make part of our testing.
    
    * When the time comes, we'll want to strike a balance between letting testers do what they want and guiding them to technologies with less test coverage. We want that "matrix" to end up as well-covered as we can, in the end.
    
* Progress updates

    * Zarf's done some preliminary planning, and will share this with the list. A few points of discussion raised:
        * Arbitrary ASCII artwork is probably a lost cause when it comes to VI accessibility, but text-art maps might be surprisingly viable. (Roguelikes are not beyond the pale, to the determined blind gamer...)
        * The fact that alt-text can assist even able-bodied gamers play through a multimedia IF work on a less capable interpreter is a great demonstration of universal access!
        * Discussion of whether the game should be a fairly staid checklist that happens to be implemented in Inform (Zarf's original idea) or something requiring a little bit of gameplay cogitation and interaction, even trivially.
            * Deborah does lots of testing for commercial websites and such, and they have her go through a realistic, practical scenario, e.g. navigating a shopping site, locating a certain brand of shoe, and "buying" it.
            * Focus more on *interaction* than on basic unit-test-style, yes/no ability to do stuff.
            * Jmac in favor of making the tests at least a little more interesting (which is not to say challenging) for the player-tester.
       
    * Twine stuff
        * Furkle plans to expand her work from last fall
        * https://github.com/furkleindustries/iftf-twine-testing
        * Challenge inherent in the fact that a Twine game is ultimately just a website, so you can grab jQuery or whatever and go nuts with it
            * And plenty of people do exactly that, by golly.
            * There are stylistic "standards" (or hypertext tropes? e.g. text cycling, stretch-text, et cetera) but no standard way of implementing any.
        * We are likely to let the Twine "Cloak of Access" implementations be "vanilla" Sugarcube & Harlowe, and report (based on testing) on how these fall short of accessibility expectations, and make recommendations about how Twine users can use well-understood patterns to amend this in their own work.
        
    * How similar should "Cloak of Access" be across implementations?
        * Similar in *the most broad* aspects, e.g. expected playtime for an able-bodied player, and overall goals.
        * Implementations can feel free to diverge as needed, in order to fulfill said goals.
        
    * ChoiceScript
        * Bit on hold pending further discussion with Dan et al. (CoG is set to have a very busy year!)
        * ChoiceScript games (as far as those present know, from experience playing em) tend to quite consistent in being nuthin but streams of plain old text in between the choice-forms.
        * Multimedia is very uncommon, beyond cover art and minimal use of color and simple graphics (in e.g. the character-stats graphs)
        * You *can* add images though: https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-advanced/
        * We'll come back to this.
        
* Other stuff
    * Liza Daly's done a lot of great work in making accessible IF, using her own homegrown system... and that's as far as we got there, so may wanna revisit approaching her about all this stuff one way or another.
    * Slack is now officially far less accessible than it was, because it dropped its IRC gateway. Deborah has yelled at them about this. (And I know that Zarf has written them an open letter too). It’s kinda-sorta usable on iOS. And that’s terrible. But, we’ll just lean on the mailing list & Skype for the present.
    
Next meeting set for Monday, May 14, 6 PM eastern.