[Accessibility-testing] Report scheduling thoughts

[Jason McIntosh]

And finally for this evening, I wanted to follow up on this note from a couple weeks ago…

I did finish pasting together and publishing IFTF’s 2018 transparency report last week. So, as promised, my main IFTF-related attention is now squarely on the accessibility testing project. I’d like to pour in as much work as I can before IFComp 2019 starts ramping up, with a mind to help push it all the way across the finish line if possible. So if you see a lot of energy coming from my direction, that’s why.

The full transparency report is here (as an 8-page PDF): https://iftechfoundation.org/documents/2018-iftf-transparency-report.pdf

And here, for the record, is my summary from that report about this project’s activity over last year:

> After more than a year of discussion, the Accessibility Testing Committee decided in early 2018 to pare down its goals and tighten its focus.
> 
> For the sake of simplicity, the committee dropped testing the accessibility of IF creation tools from its goals, focusing exclusively on game-play platforms instead. From there, we decided to create two IF games – one parser-based (via Inform) and one hypertext (via Twine) – that would serve as accessibility obstacle courses for different play-platforms. We planned to invite volunteers, all users of different assistive technologies (such as text-to-speech screen readers), to play the games and then rate their experiences with a set of surveys. We would then analyze this data and present it all to the community in the form of a final report, filled with observations and recommendations from the various accessibility experts on our committee.
> 
> By the year’s end, we had the games written and tested, the surveys drafted, and a call for testers released to the world by way of the AbleGamers Foundation’s Player Panels program. At the time of my writing this summary in mid-March of 2019, we have collected a lot of wonderful and surprising player response. I very much look forward to describing, for next year’s transparency report, what we ended up doing with it all.