Re: W3C Workshop on Web Games - Position Paper

Hello all,

Very shortly I'll be off to the W3C Web Games Workshop [0] (regrets for the meeting; I’ll be flying). Really looking forward to letting you all know about it next week :-). The various position papers all sound great, and there's another specifically accessibility-focused one too [1], which is awesome. (I've referenced ours as [2] in this message, for convenience.)

I mentioned that I had been doing some research and that's continued in the form of background reading and preparing some discussion suggestions based on the paper. I've even tried out compiling some C code to WebAssembly, to get a feel for it, which was fun. In the past, a friend and I developed a vision-impairment focused version of Quake called AudioQuake, and whilst I wasn't able to get that completely compiled to WebAssembly and running in-browser, it's been a very interesting learning experience so far. I did find that Quake on the web has been done [3,4], which is pretty cool - as have more modern games, such as Quake 3 (this was done by id Software quite a while back using a custom plugin and known as "Quake Live" but a JS/WASM version now exists) and the modern Unreal Engine, which is impressive. I'm still thinking about ways we might engage the tooling out there to bridge the gap between a semantic-less bitmap rendered UI and something like the Accessibility Object Model, and hope we might make steps towards a plan there during the workshop - though anything that comes from the discussions will be great, so will see where they go :-).

What I have been able to do more successfully in parallel to the work we've been doing on the position paper - though not itself web-related - is modernise the code behind an accessible map authoring tool I created [that has terribly, terribly simple geometry] called the Level Description Language. It takes an XML file that describes the layout of a map and turns it into a file that the Quake map tools can compile and you can play in-game. Aside from the geometric limitations, it does work quite well as a proof-of-concept, with lighting and styling applied (there are two texture sets and lighting styles to choose from: military base or medieval) so that blind people could make maps that people with full vision would find familiar. I've no idea if I'll end up demonstrating it, as it depends where the discussion goes, but it's there as a signpost to what might be possible (back in 2008 when I made it, I was hoping we could move it to a newer engine in future, but this would need a lot of help, and alas "real life" got in the way at the tine).

I've got a development branch I'm still working on, in case anyone's interested and feeling intrepid [5] - though whilst AudioQuake runs on Windows, I'm not all there yet with Windows support, or even decent set-up instructions, for LDL.

Of course I've been working on bringing my awareness of what's possible in game accessibility these days a bit more up-to-date in preparation for the workshop :-).

Back to the topic at hand: many thanks again for all your input with the position paper and general messages of support, and to The Paciello Group for sending me :-).


Matthew

[0] https://www.w3.org/2018/12/games-workshop/
[1] https://www.w3.org/2018/12/games-workshop/papers/accessible-mode.txt
[2] https://www.w3.org/2018/12/games-workshop/papers/web-games-adaptive-accessibility.html
[3] WebQuake repo: https://github.com/Triang3l/WebQuake
[4] WebQuake Chrome app repo: https://github.com/kzahel/WebQuake-Chrome
[5] https://github.com/matatk/agrip/tree/ldl-build-and-python3 - Note specifically this is not the master branch - and documentation on how to get LDL actually going is not totally there yet, though broadly you'd need to get AudioQuake working (for which there is documentation) and then run "pip3 install -r requirements.txt" and "./make-tools.sh" in the sibling LDL directory. The XML file whose name starts with "first" was the first that was sent to me by a player who is blind.

-- 
Matthew Tylee Atkinson
--
Senior Accessibility Engineer
The Paciello Group
https://www.paciellogroup.com
A Vispero Company
https://www.vispero.com/
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Received on Tuesday, 25 June 2019 22:47:25 UTC