Re: Seeking Blind or Visually Impaired Alpha Testers
Hi Brad:
Greatly appreciate the effort you've made!
The client you’ve been interacting with is the standard GUI with all the usual bells and whistles. It coverts a data stream coming from the game world into a format which browsers can display, and does some programming tricks to make that text scroll when received. We've made a sincere effort to make that interface as accessible as possible, but the scrolling text is a problem, as you’ve experienced. That UI implements the WAI-ARIA Live Regions specification, but we’ve found that the different browser and screen reader vendors interpret that differently from each other, so that so far we haven’t been able to make it a consistently happy experience across different screen readers. Instead of trying to hack all that to get the GUI working with screen readers, we've decided to take a step back and rethink the whole concept of how sightless players might interact with a textual virtual world. Thus the new interface we’re now alpha testing, which has no GUI elements aside from a single text field to enter commands into. After that, the UI speaks the game data and it’s very much more straightforward - no menus, buttons, scrolling text or other impediments.
So far, our alpha testers have been excited about the talking UI. The UI itself is so simple that there's not much to say about it, so, we're working with the alpha group more on how to adapt the game world itself to be as voice friendly as possible. For instance, historically TriadCity has interacted with users' browsers to open new windows and present additional content visually. So we need to sort out those interactions. And, we need to ensure we've comprehensively made command-line equivalents for all GUI controls available and straightforward - which is a bit involved when players are customizing their houses and things like that.
The "talking" technology currently works perfectly on Safari on the Mac. The other browsers don't yet get it right. That's why the alpha test is limited for now. Soon as the other browsers catch up, we'll invite the rest of the world.
One final note. The talking UI currently being tested is itself a half-way step toward a fully verbal interface which can be used on mobile devices as well as in browsers. Since the computing world is rapidly moving away from desktops, to smart phones and tablets, we hope this turns out to be an intelligent long-term strategy for making a textual virtual world accessible to all players, sighted and blind alike. So, we're very interested in your feedback!
Thanks again!
Anyone who'd like to participate, please write me at the address in my OP, and I'll reply with instructions.
Cheers!
--Mark
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