Screen reader view

[Zeita]

Hi all,

Today Kinaed requested that we add a description of any ascii art that we post for the benefit of those of us using screen reader views. I thought this was a very good suggestion and started thinking over how best this could be addressed.

My thought was that, as most ASCII art that is used can probably be found in mail headers and sails, that we address that as a first point. If we could have an extra field when setting up our mail headers/footers named, for now: 'Alternate Display'. You could then then describe the various aspects of the art, that those have set a flag on their character 'Alternate view' would see as an alternative to the header and seal.

The same system could be broadened out over time and coding to an overall 'screen reader view' that caters to other issue areas in the game.

Thanks,
-M.

[quanin]

I'm not entirely sure how practical such a thing would be to code, or for that matter how many would think to use it - I think in a lot of cases the majority of people who'd add a description to their ascii art are the same people who'd choose an actual description over ascii art in most cases. After speaking with the player who was originally having this issue, I'm not sure how much additional help that would have been in her situation, as useful as it sounds in theory.

That having been said, we have (or had) a system in place already that could be interpreted as a screen reader mode, of sorts. Things like colour codes, if provided a certain way, would reveal their raw strings to you if you had colour off (I used this plenty when crafting things for other people). I'm not sure if such a creature still exists, but that might be one option - since a majority of people who use screen readers probably won't care overmuch if colour's turned on or not anyway. That would probably cut down on some of the code burden if staff decides after all to go that direction.

[Pixie]

If we could have an extra field when setting up our mail headers/footers named, for now: 'Alternate Display'. You could then then describe the various aspects of the art, that those have set a flag on their character 'Alternate view' would see as an alternative to the header and seal.

This really sounds like a great idea!

[Kinaed]

It's very important to me that TI be accessible to people with vision impairments.
That said, I worry that we'd program this and no one/very few people would use it, even when they should.

I think we should add something like {a that designates a line as ascii art and will not display the art, but rather a tag that reads "An Ascii art picture is here", if the player's configuration is to ignore ascii.
Getting people to write alternative descriptions is something I just can't see most people doing or being enforceable policy-wise, even though.

[Inertia]

It would be hard to enforce and monitor but I think it could catch on, especially if it also had the {Z functionality that I think most people forget about already.

I'd suggest a more initially IC-flavored tag if you've got ascii off, though. Maybe like, "Artwork is displayed here. (OOC: To view the artwork, you must have ascii toggled on.)"

Not married to the wording there, and I know it's a longer message, but I think it follows better with how the game currently provides OOC prompts for IC situations.

[quanin]

I'm still not entirely convinced it's an ideal solution. Both because people will more than likely forget about it, or decide against using it, and also because if someone chose not to use it it couldn't count as anything about which the staff could do. You'd be more likely to get results by discouraging the use of ascii art in general (it's a text-based game, after all, where descriptions are key), but that would be equally not ideal. I don't know what the right answer is, but I don't think the right answer looks like this.