Since assuming management of IFTF’s accessibility testing project a few months ago, I’ve decided to update this blog every now and again with a public progress summary. Consider this the first!

This spring, the accessibility committee plans to form a number of working groups who will each create a small, purpose-built accessibility-test game. Currently, we’re planning to build games in Inform, Twine, and ChoiceScript.

Each game will serve as a sort of obstacle course of accessibility challenges, both those common to computer interactions, and those specific to IF. Notably, the entity running this course will not be the game’s player, but the game’s own development and play software. The player — one of the volunteer testers we plan to recruit, in the near future — will simply ride along and take note of how well it performs. We’ll base these challenges on WCAG 2.0 Level A, a set of recommendations that — if properly implemented — provide a broad basis of good accessibility practices.

The high-level questions each game seeks to answer:

• Do this platform’s development tools allow an author to make appropriate affordances for players with disabilities?

  (As a simple example: Can you specify alt text that accompanies an image which appears during the game?)

• Do the separate programs that run games created with this platform succeed in representing any such affordances?

  (If an image with a game has alt text defined, for example, will the play-platform know when and how to display that text appropriately?)

The real questions will be much more specific, of course, and many will make their way into surveys that the working groups will create alongside the test games. Earlier this year, committee member Deborah Kaplan drafted a simple example survey for a notional test game, to show the spirit we have in mind.

This work also takes a page from Roger Firth’s Cloak of Darkness. This classic specification for a tiny parser-based IF includes a number of activities that a traditional model-world game system is expected to support: moving around among rooms, playing with light sources, hanging clothes on hooks, and so on. By boasting a Cloak of Darkness implementation, a given parser-IF development system can both prove its basic functionality and provide a small, rich source-code example.

Unsurprisingly, accessibility committee members with longer personal IF histories all thought of Cloak at around the same time, once we started thinking about asking testers to play a pre-arranged game of some kind. Since we will aim to test not model-world flexibility but rather affordances for players with disabilities, we opted to create new works rather than explicitly adapt this one. But, threads of that trusty old Cloak will wind through our output, just the same.