[Accessibility-testing] Update for week of January 7

[Jason McIntosh]

Meeting debrief:

We’re good to go on these dates for a testing window (Jan 9 - Feb 4). I plan to share a draft greeting to the list with y’all before making an initial post to the list.

We discussed our surprise at the lack of fully blind testers (one out of the 29 responders, with 17 reporting as low-vision). Mark said that this isn’t super surprising given that AbleGamers has not had much luck yet in reaching out to blind gamers (and in part, perhaps, because AbleGamers never worked with IF much before this project).

We agreed to move forward with the testers we have but to also put some effort into recruiting more blind testers for this project (who can then start participating immediately, by golly). And Mark would ask they all sign up for Player Panels too!

So, let’s coordinate that after the launch this thing.

It occurred to me afterwards that I can and should write a blog post to the IFTF blog at that time, which we can also use to help fill in our blind-tester coverage. So, I’ll plan to do that towards the end of the week.

> On Jan 7, 2019, at 4:55 PM, Jason McIntosh <jmac at jmac.org> wrote:
> 
> Good afternoon everyone,
> 
> I’d like to host a check-in call this evening at 7 PM Eastern; please join if you can.
> 
> Here is what’s news since December 19, and I welcome comment on it, either here on the list or on the call:
> 
> • We have names! 29 of them. I’ve just created a mailing list called “testing2019 at iftechfoundation.org” and put them all on it, as well as every member of the accessibility-testing mailing list. Per past conversation among us, I’ve set the list to accept posts from any member. I haven’t posted anything to the list yet, or otherwise announced its existence to its membership.
> 
> (I hope that a mailing list called “testing2019” is not a terrible idea in and of itself, since it looks a bit like someone debugging a mail server?)
> 
> • If we’re happy with everything, I want to propose launching the test on Wednesday, Jan 9, and my own sending an initial greeting to all the testers at that time. I’d also propose keeping testing acting through Monday, Feb 4. Both these dates are one week later than our last proposed dates, and reflect how we got the email addresses a bit later than initially planned.
> 
> • I made a change to Twine of Access that adds inline link-text replacement to one section of the game (picking up the peach pit). Claire earlier today merged the change into the code repository (thanks!) and both Austin and Zack have declared the change to be appropriately challenging/annoying to screen-reader users, which is exactly what I was going for.
> 
> You can see the change for yourself, if you haven’t already, at http://jmac.org/misc/a11y/Twine%20of%20Access/twine-of-access.html and selecting “Play”, “Great hall”, then “Sit down”. I’m pretty happy with it; 
> 
> • I’d like to make some very last-minute tweaks to the public testing website and the surveys, but I don’t want to delay this particular email any longer, so they’re not done yet.
> 
>> On Dec 19, 2018, at 4:19 PM, Jason McIntosh <jmac at jmac.org> wrote:
>> 
>> First, as Zarf said a couple of days ago, please submit to me or him an estimate of the number of hours you donated to IFTF during 2018 (if you haven’t already). This includes meeting time as well as time spent reviewing or working on projects for this team.
>> 
>> And now, a debrief of the December 17 meeting:
>> 
>> • Assuming that we get a list of testers’ emails next week, we’ll plan to commence testing on Wednesday, January 2 (two weeks from today), and keep it open through Monday, January 28.
>> 
>> 	• I’ll set up a mailing list that testers can use to contact us with questions.
>> 
>> 	• I will act as designated point-person for either responding to questions, or delegating their responses to others on the committee.
>> 	
>> 	• The mailing list will be read/write for all participants.
>> 
>> 	• If we do get a list of addresses well before January 2, we’ll send them all a greeting, let them know the planned schedule, and ask them to stand by until then.
>> 
>> • We agreed that the testing materials should just be on a public website somewhere, assumedly within iftechfoundation.org’s domain. (Versus emailing all participants the website, or something.)
>> 
>> 	• I have full access to IFTF’s general-purpose web server, so I’ll just pop it up there somewhere.
>> 
>> 	• Deborah suggested adding a little more CSS kindness to the web pages to increase their readability for sighted testers. I plan to do this. (Really, I’ll just use a different export-stylesheet with Marked, the program I use to translate Markdown docs into HTML.)
>> 
>> 	• I also plan to fix up the page’s titles, which are just their filenames right now, oops
>> 
>> 	• And I gotta add a proper link to A Night Below the Opera.
>> 
>> • I plan to make another pass at the ANBtO survey, keeping the gameplay questions that are specific to accessibility obstacles but dropping others for the sake of brevity.
>> 
>> • Claire will add the requested cycle-link obstacle to Twine of Access before January 1.
>> 
>>> On Dec 17, 2018, at 9:37 AM, Jason McIntosh <jmac at jmac.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> It’s been quite a year for this team! Let’s have our last group call of 2018 this evening at 7 PM Eastern time on the usual Skype channel.
>>> 
>>> Things to discuss:
>>> 
>>> • Player Panel update: Chris Powers contacted me this morning to say that our project’s description was released to the field of testers today. They have the next week to sign up, and we should get a list of interested parties next week.
>>> 
>>> • The state of the test material (the instruction pages and the surveys)
>>> 
>>> • Logistics about distributing the material - when, and how
>>> 
>>> • The 11th-hour tweaks to the Twine game we discussed last time (particularly the cycle link)
>> 
>> 
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>