[Accessibility-testing] July 2 meeting notes and assignments

[Jason McIntosh]

Howdy all! Here is what happened on Monday:

Present: Austin, Claire (a.k.a. furkle), Deborah, jmac, Mark, Zack

• We discussed the two “Cloak” game drafts.
	• Folks are midway through Zarf’s “A Night Beneath the Opera", which is… surprisingly large? (Zarf not present to defend himself here, ha ha.)
	• Claire posted a link to “Twine of Access" to the list right earlier on Monday, and folks should go ahead and try it. It’s playable as-is; Claire intends to add a few more details to it and will note their addition on the list.
	• In both cases, the accessibility experts playing through the games should please keep notes as they play, both about their experience playing and their thoughts about how well the games exercise accessibility challenges. Then, please share them with the team.

	• We agreed that the test games ought to be built with default toolsets, and not pulling in lots of extra accesibility libraries or techniques outside of the core tools. This will necessarily mean that Inform game may seem more accessible in some ways than the Twine one, since core Inform gives you more a11y-friendly techniques out of the box. But we want to identify and document all the places that the core creative tools excel or fall short in this arena, and from there help give these tools’ maintainers a path to correct this, and these tools’ users knowledge and advice about making accessible work given what they have in the meantime.

• Austin raised the point that we should confirm that the test platform combinations we’ve chosen *work at all* before expecting testers to use them! For example (and if I recall correctly), he couldn’t get the last release of Gargoyle to compile on Linux, but the unreleased Git source did work.

• We agreed that our next step after approving the test games is to create the “test packets” the games will be part of, including game-specific surveys for testers to complete, and any other documentation they’ll need. I asked that folks start thinking of what game-specific survey questions might naturally work with these games (again using Deborah’s survey mockup, as seen in her folder in the Dropbox, as a model).

• I said I’d pull together a simple webpage collecting all the resource URLs that we’ve lately been throwing around on this list (which is great). I have not done this yet! You will know when I have.

Next meeting will be on Monday July 16 at 6 PM Eastern. Have a good holiday, everyone!