[Accessibility-testing] Feb 12 meeting recap & various first response reactions

[Jason McIntosh]

Present: Austin, Claire, Deborah, jmac, Zack

We spent a lot of the meeting talking about patterns that jumped out at us from the collected responses. A sampling:

(And let me state here that I mean “Opera” to refer to the game, not the browser)

• Many low-vision users wanted more high-contrast / white-on-black text options.

• More people than I would have expected could not see any alt-text for the image in Opera.

• Interesting to learn of the existence and popularity of Nick Stockton’s IF plugin for NVDA. It seems to have known bugs that many veteran players were inured to (but still able to describe, knowing exactly where the blame lay).

• Lots of people had problems with Opera’s plaque (involving a box quote). Others struggled with the slide projector (involving menu selections). I wonder how it correlates with familiarity with parser-game conventions. (Did we ask about that in the survey?)

• I was surprised how few blind testers had much to say about the Twine game’s cycle-links. Taking other feedback into account, I hypothesize that veteran screen-reader users are simply used to getting their focus bounced around by Javascript hacks like this all over the web, and just take it in stride, as annoying as it is?

• More than one screen-reader user suggested making the link between picking up objects and having them appear in your inventory more obvious by placing the inventory list closer to the bottom of the screen. I admit I’m not sure why this suggestion, in particular.

• Every low-vision or blind user was 100% thumbs-down on the text-art map, as expected — except for one dude who said “Easy as a piece of cake”, and I appreciate him proving that *there’s always one*.

Some individual responses that jumped out to me, and which we discussed:

• I loved Felix Grützmacher’s complaint about Opera’s “twist the 6 to turn it into a 9” puzzle, saying “This is a very visual way of thinking, and many blind people do not know what the numerals look like.” I have to wonder, Zarf, was this intentional? Because it’s a sort of second-order accessibility issue I didn’t expect at all before yesterday!

• Melinda Embleton has mobility issues that reduce her ability to type more than a little, and she uses no AT. She was able to play through Opera but it was a struggle. I thought that an interesting case… the naive solution is “well, use AT, then” but that seems like assuming a lot. It might be nice to have a “community official” list of AT that plays nice with IF (and doesn’t break anyone’s budget, if possible)?

• Laura Swetz suggested playing a sound effect whenever anything pops up. This brought to kind the recent AbleGamers guidelines, as Mark has described them to me, to alert players of stuff via multiple sensory channels (e.g. when you level up, print “You leveled up!” *and* play a unique sound effect, consistently). What an interesting idea, to make that a habit in all kinds of IF, which is traditionally stone-silent (no matter how visually noisy it might get)