[Accessibility-testing] March 14 2018 meeting notes

[Jason McIntosh]

• We still need to nail down a canonical list of interpreters and ATs to test against. I’ll get that ball rolling in this mailing list, presently. (I shall begin by recalling past discussion on this topic that’s already happened, so it’s not like we’re starting from square one for no reason here.)

• I had contacted Dan about ChoiceScript + Cloak of Access prior to the meeting, and Dan acknowledged in the Slack shortly before this meeting began that he needs to excuse himself active participation in the project for a few months. We all agree this poses no problem, and we’ll roll ahead with Inform and Twine as the specific IF platforms to test for now — leaving enough process-documentation so that other IF techs (including ChoiceScript!) can create their own access tests and reports in the future.

Let me take this opportunity to thank Dan for his valuable input and insight so far, especially the strong insistence on thorough documentation. I very much hope to keep to the spirit of that advice as we move forward in the coming weeks.

• We decided that “15 minutes or shorter” is a good target length for “Cloak of Access" variants (measured in how long an able-bodied and IF-conversant player would take to get through it). And we reiterated that despite the cheeky title, “CoA” games needn’t have any similarity to “Cloak of Darkness”, nor even to each other, other than being very short and easy to complete (for an IF game).

• Some talk specific to the Twine implementation, and how that writing recommendations for platform can be pretty wooly — since it’s at root a JavaScript framework. We agreed that making some solid baseline recommendations that Twine-using creators should keep in mind for accessibility’s sake is a valid goal, even if any individual Twine game is likely to color outside the lines set down by the basic framework. Right now there’s really no resource at all like this, so just establishing a start would be a great service.

A specific example that came up during the meeting: Game creators can see pop-up dialog boxes, versus modal ones, as gauche or tacky, since this assertion of the underlying browser’s UI clattering on top of the creator’s careful environment can really break immersion. But they can be so much more useful for AT users, precisely because a pop-up popping up is unmissable, and thus may lead to fewer frustrations to players with disabilities.

• We reviewed the sketch that Zarf make of the Inform version of CoA, and Deborah’s followup to that, all of which has appeared previously on this mailing list. Zarf plans to have a playable draft within a couple more weeks. Also reviewed mailing list discussion regarding potential new committee membership, and let the conclusions already expressed there stand.

Next meeting time set for Tuesday, May 29, at 6 PM Eastern. (Because Monday is Memorial Day.)