[Accessibility-testing] Intro for Player Panels application

[Jason McIntosh]

All,

Here is my proposed brief description of our project, intended for use with our Player Panels application. Thoughts welcome.

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IFTF accessibility testing project for interactive fiction

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation founded in 2016. It supports technologies and services that enable the ongoing play, creation, and study of interactive fiction (IF), which we broadly define as text-centric digital games and related work. This includes games in the style of classic text adventures, more experimental hypertext work, and everything in between and beyond.

One of the programs that IFTF chartered at the time of its own founding is its accessibility testing project (https://iftechfoundation.org/committees/access/). Due to its reliance on text and its tendency to let players play at their own speed, IF has always enjoyed relatively high accessibility among digital games. But this has always been a happy accident of sorts, and as technology develops and new ways to present text-based work becomes available to creators, IF’s accessibility has started to slip. We aim to help address this by measuring the state of accessibility within contemporary IF play platforms, and then reporting our findings and recommendations to the IF community.

To this end, IFTF’s accessibility testing committee has prepared a pair of very short text games specifically created to offer IF platforms accessibility challenges: one is a parser-driven treasure hunt, and the other is a web-based hypertext work. We would like a testing panel, comprising players with disabilities and users of various assistive technology setups, to play through these games and then answer a short survey about their experiences with them. We plan to transform this gathered data into a public report that should help IF game and tool creators be more mindful of accessibility needs, and also a methodology that can assist developers in testing their own work later.