Re: Bring the group back to life - Call for consensus by 24 July 2020

Hi Matthew,

------ Original message ------
From: "Mathew Atkinson" <matkinson@paciellogroup.com>
To: "public-games@w3.org" <public-games@w3.org>
Date: 23/07/2020 18:40:20

>Hello,
>
>Good to virtually meet you all. I've made a formal request to join this group, as I heard about the effort to reboot it. If there's anything I can contribute from a game accessibility perspective I'd be happy to help. I attended the (awesome) W3C Workshop on Web Games last year and co-presented in the accessibility session. I'm a member of the W3C's Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) working group and we would be happy for me to act as a liaison with this group if you would like.
>
>The proposed charter mentions the APA group, which is great, though it doesn't mention accessibility in any other capacity. Perhaps we could include some consideration of accessibility in the charter (via the scope of work section, perhaps) directly too?

Accessibility is certainly in scope. Adding a bullet to mention it 
explicitly seems fine (and minor in the sense that it does not change 
the scope). I took the liberty to do it directly, reusing a bullet from 
the call for participation of the workshop. The bullet encompasses both 
accessibility and localization, which we also discussed at the workshop:
"Explore capabilities —APIs, semantics, techniques for rendering, 
processing, personalization, customization, interoperability, etc.— that 
developers can leverage to localize games and guarantee that they are 
accessible."
https://github.com/w3c/charter-drafts/commit/c00a1cb16adee9383f7595380eec32c8640530fc

>
>In case it's of interest, since the workshop, I made a proof-of-concept demo of connecting web games' UIs to assistive technologies; there's an article on 24 Accessibility that explains the background, technique and plans in more detail.
>
>* Article: https://www.24a11y.com/2019/game-accessibility-and-the-web/
>* Demo: http://matatk.agrip.org.uk/web-game-accessibility-explorations/page-sdl.html
>* GitHub repo: https://github.com/matatk/web-game-accessibility-explorations
>
>Two of the main game engines (Unreal and Unity) have also been working on interfacing directly with screen-readers, which is excellent news for the industry as a whole. I'm not sure if any of the main game engines support talking to screen-readers when the games are compiled for the web; more research needed. As discussed in the article, there are a couple of directions in which I'd like to take this further: applying it to existing game GUIs and using the Accessibility Object Model (AOM) as the supporting technology.
Very cool, thanks for sharing!

>
>
>
>I hope this has been of interest and look forward to contributing to the group.
+1

Thanks,
Francois.

Received on Tuesday, 28 July 2020 10:12:09 UTC