Re: Accessibility at the W3C Workshop on Web Games - feedback and questions

Hi Matthew,

I finally got to parse your extensive write up of the Games conference. 
I found it really, really useful. I recommend others read also and there 
are a wealth of useful links there. [1]

Firstly, your older paper in 'Level Description Languages' (LDL) and 
accessible map creation (from the user perspective) is brilliant :-)

Overall, there are some take away's from me that were really helpful 
(and I learned a lot!).

Firstly, the Luke Wagner deck on WebAssembly (WASM) and proposals for 
improved WebIDL/JavaScript bindings, performance and memory management 
gave me some much needed insight into potential advantages of this 
runtime environment for accessibility, due to its ability to access to 
accessibility (and other) APIS. The proposal mentioned means potentially 
without a big performance hit, memory leaks and the current clunky need 
to instantiate binding expressions in memory etc ( at least that's my 
reading of it). The current binding proposals discussed in the deck are 
really interesting, as they aim to address current performance issues 
with JavaScript - so worth a read alround. [2] [3]

Some of the challenges we have in APA is understanding (for gaming and XR):

  * How can we know which runtime environment, rendering or VM machine
    environment - when used as a platform for gaming or XR applications,
    provides the best architecture for accessibility and is sympatico
    with existing AT?
  * Which has the best potential for semantic support and communication
    with platform and browser APIs?

I have a question regarding glTF [4]

You mention glTF, and I'm not totally sure how that fits into the stack? 
It doesn't seem to be a full browser runtime environment like 
WebAssembly, but enables the loading of 3D scenes and models. So my 
question is around your references to the benefits of 'machine-readable 
applications' and how this could be good for accessibility? Do glTF 
files have inherent support for object description or other meta-data 
can provide an accessibility architecture when loaded? I just don't know 
much about this.


Any finally, ..any more info you have on 'semantic-scene graph' 
modelling would be really helpful *grin.


Great work Matthew, thanks.


Josh


[1] http://matatk.agrip.org.uk/articles/w3c-workshop-on-web-games/
[2] Luke Wagner deck WASM - 
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10ynaGMBAdiCLVyoyBDSNsNhtpQT9qm_QWO6VBI2LCGA/edit#slide=id.p
[3] https://github.com/webassembly/proposals
[4] https://www.khronos.org/gltf/

-- 
Emerging Web Technology Specialist/A11y (WAI/W3C)