[Accessibility-testing] May 20 meeting debrief & planning updates

[Jason McIntosh]

Present at the May 20 call: Austin, Deborah, Jason, Mark

Everyone present voiced approval of the current report draft. We set a date of Monday, June 3 as our planned release-date for this report. “Release” here, meaning that I’d move the report (in HTML format, just as the draft is now) to a permanent URL within the iftechfoundation.org domain, discoverable by a static web page elsewhere on the IFTF website. We’d then proceed to announce the report on blogs & social media, pop it into IFTF’s newsletter, and so on.

During the call, Deborah requested a rewrite of the lead-in to “List of recommendations” (https://jmac.org/misc/a11y/report_draft/#listofrecommendations) in order to make it more clear that these recommendations don’t all apply to a single “role” of IF community member; they apply with varying weights to authors, authoring-system developers, gameplay-platform maintainers, and others.

I invited Deborah to submit her own suggestion for that, but here is my attempt. What do we think?

> These recommendations list several features that a work of interactive fiction should support in order to achieve better accessibility, based on the sources listed above (see “Sources for this report”).
> 
> We address these recommendations to the whole IF community – including authors, authoring-system creators, interpreter maintainers, and others. We acknowledge that their realization would require varying levels of planning and participation from all these community roles. Because implementation details lay outside the scope of this report, we elected to present all these recommendations as a single list, rather than attempt to divide it up into a series of sub-lists for authors, developers, and so on.
> 
> That said, we expect that IF authors can use many of these recommendations right away as design guidelines, implementable using current game-creation tools. Others may require changes in those tools, or in the programs people use to play IF, or both.


Beyond the above re-write, I updated the online draft (https://jmac.org/misc/a11y/report_draft/) yet again with some minor changes and improvements resulting from a week-later read-through I gave it. Not enough reason to re-read it if you’ve read it already, but now’s a great time to read it for the first time if you still need to. :)

We didn’t plan a next call, since I’m not sure there’s much else to discuss that doesn’t fit at least as well on this list (see all of the above).

We’re very nearly done, y’all!