[Accessibility-testing] Meeting Debrief - Sept 10 2018

[Jason McIntosh]

We spent most of the meeting discussing the opportunity to make use of the AbleGamers Player Panels program, per discussion earlier on this list. Our next steps involve definitive answering of these questions, posed by Mark:

- What type of player are you looking for?
- What would you like them to do?
- How long do they need to do it?
- What are you paying them?

Jason had already shared some preliminary answers to these, and we refined some during the meeting while preserving one for later discussion.

To wit: “What type of player are you looking for?” includes asking about accessibility requirements and AT setups. We agreed (based on prior discussion) that, given the nature of IF, we’d get the most mileage out of testers with visual and mobility impairments and their corresponding assistive technologies. (But of course we would welcome representation from other players as well.)

Regarding “What are you paying them?”, Mark said that AbleGamers tends to reward PP testers with $10 Amazon gift cards. This is right around the scale that I remember us talking about for IFTF-furnished awards, as well, so I was glad to hear that! I’ll start another email thread with an aim to answer this one definitively.

Once AbleGamers has answers to the above questions, plus a short summary of our project and its goals, it will poll its approximately 420 Player Panel members to see who is interested. After a week or so, AbleGamers will then forward the contact information of the interested sub-group, and we take it from there. (At the end of the testing, both we and the testers provide some meta-feedback to AbleGamers about how well the experience went; that’ll e.g. give us a chance to politely point out no-shows, while allowing the testers to hold us to account as well.)

On the topic of surveys: Deborah feels that the ideal post-game survey should combine the open-ended questions of Zack’s draft with questions specific to the game. Open questions allow testers to describe their experience in ways that we wouldn’t have predicted, which is important — specific questions allow us to ask testers about game aspects that they might have otherwise overlooked entirely while playing. (And this is especially important in accessibility testing, where aspects of play might be literally unnoticeable to the player due to being inaccessible.)

So, the Night Below the Opera survey needs further refinement; Zack and Zarf should keep working on this, and I’d encourage sharing or even performing this work on the mailing list as much as seems appropriate. (We are especially waiting to hear further on Zarf on this topic, as the author of the game in question!)

We discussed the medium of the surveys themselves, and chose Google surveys as a default. They are *probably* accessible enough, and other IFTF programs (e.g. IFComp) have already made use of them without disaster or dismay. We should build a test survey using Google tools and test its accessibility as a preliminary step.

Next meeting is Monday, Sept 24 at 6 PM Eastern time. We should, by then, be prepared to submit a Player Panels proposal, if we haven’t done so already.