As chair of IFTF’s Accessibility Testing Project, I am pleased and proud to announce the publication of its report to the IF community.

This report summarizes the work and research performed by the project since its launch in 2016. It includes the two games (one Twine, one Inform) that we concocted to test IF platforms’ accessibility fitness, and the survey responses that we received from dozens of players with disabilities who took these games for a spin on a variety of assistive-technology setups.

Most importantly, it lists fifteen recommendations to IF’s creative community for improving the accessibility of future work, both in terms of individual games and the software used to create and present them. These recommendations base themselves on Accessible Player Experiences, a thoroughly researched set of guidelines and design patterns recently published by The AbleGamers Foundation. We believe that these recommendations could help make IF games more accessible not just to players with disabilities, but to the entire potential audience for interactive fiction.

AbleGamers partnered with IFTF on the publication of this report from the start, and we extend our gratitude to it for its invaluable assistance — as well as to all the accessibility consultants and IF experts who volunteered so much time and attention towards this project, and all the players who responded so thoughtfully to our testing surveys.

IFTF plans to keep the report permanently available at http://accessibility.iftechfoundation.org. The report’s publication concludes the work of the Accessibility Testing Project, hence its move on our programs page to a new “Past Programs” section. We hope that this report sparks discussion and inspiration within the community about ways to make interactive fiction available to as many players as possible.