[Accessibility-testing] July 30 meeting recap

[Jason McIntosh]

Present: Austin, Jmac, Mark, Zack, Zarf

• Some interesting discussion about “Night Beneath the Opera”:
	
	• Per feedback, Zarf updated the game with a more clear goal and a couple of endings. New version is up for further play and feedback! (https://eblong.com/zarf/tmp/accessib/)

	• Interesting discussion about the issue of the “dance chart” puzzle, which (intentionally) is a cinch for a sighted player and essentially unsolvable for a blind one. At issue: We *know*, just from internal feedback, that this puzzle is impassible for players depending on screen readers. So… should we still keep it in the game, especially when Inform doesn’t have a facility for “Treat this ASCII art as an image, and use this alt text”?

	If I recall correctly decided on keeping the puzzle in the game as-is, so long as the game is accompanied by a walkthrough or a hint sheet that gives the solutions to puzzles to the various accessibility-challenge puzzles, the dance chart included. This way, players will be able to get through the whole game even if it is partially inaccessible for them on a certain platform. And in the case of the dance chart in particular, we decided it was worth keeping also because players with differing levels of visual impairment might have other experiences with it to report.

• We discussed the proposed rest-of-the-year/project schedule I posted to the list a few days ago.

	• In general, folks at the meeting thought it looked pretty good — I’m still open to comment, of course!

	• Lots of discussion in particular about the early-wrapup option I included midway through. I described how I included that as a nod to a sort-of devil’s-advocate question that Dan Fabulich posed on the list last year: Do we *need* to have a wide testathon, or do we have enough expertise just within our own group (plus a small number of other hand-picked volunteer testers with other disabilities, perhaps) to adequately fill out the testing matrix?

	I do think it’s a question worth asking ourselves as a team, and honestly I am not sure what the answer will be! But first we gotta finish building the testing materials & documentation, per the schedule.

	• I off-by-one'd all the dates on the schedule and need to correct them, oops

• Next meeting is Monday August 13 at 6 PM Eastern. Per the schedule, I plan to have presented some kind of on-paper draft of the testing matrix by then. I’d also love to see complete drafts of both games!