Re: Survey for WCAG and Game Accessibility Guidelines Gap Analysis

That was an incredibly "humbling" experience. As a full time WCAG auditor I
am also intimately familiar with the Game Accessibility Guidelines because
as luck has it I was educated as a game developer and I did my final
assignment on Game Accessibility specifically.

This showed me that WCAG is utterly incapable of considering all the things
needed for an Accessible game. I answered way many more "1" answers than I
would have thought.

WCAG assumes the user has assistive technology and the GAG doesn't. That is
I think one of the main reason for the difference between the
considerations. Apart from that WCAG assumes the author of a website
actually wants(!) their user to be able to perceive and understand all the
information on the website and actually wants(!) their users to be able to
operate the functionality on the website. But in a game there is a
challenge. Hiding information from the player and making functionality hard
to operate could(!) be part of the challenge.

WCAG has some exceptions for "tests" (see for example SC 1.1.1 that says
"Test: If non-text content is a test or exercise that would be invalid if
presented in text, then text alternatives at least provide descriptive
identification of the non-text content."), that essentially give games a
free pass "you are allowed to frustrate and miscommunicate to the user
because it's a test". (For another example see 2.2.1 that says "Essential
Exception: The time limit is essential and extending it would invalidate
the activity;")

I would love to chat more about the differences between WCAG and GAG (being
familiar with both) if needed.

Thank you for this work,

Brian Bors

2018-03-09 0:42 GMT+01:00 Thomas Westin <thomasw@dsv.su.se>:

> *Dear Colleagues, *
>
> We are conducting a gap analysis of WCAG 2.0 and Game Accessibility
> Guidelines. The study is a contribution to the work by the W3C WCAG Silver
> Taskforce that aims to go beyond the web to apps. However, games are a
> special type of application that is limited by game rules and have many
> forms of inputs and outputs that are unique to games or less common in
> other applications.  We need your input to validate our gap analysis.
>
> *Please answer the survey on or before March 20th 2018.  *
> It may take about 20-30 minutes to fill in.
>
> *You find the survey here: https://goo.gl/BB4sqa
> <https://goo.gl/BB4sqa>   *
> The results will be analyzed and reported in the academic press.
>
> *Thanks a lot for your kind collaboration. *
> Thomas Westin, Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden
> JaEun Jemma Ku, University of Illinois, USA
> Jérôme Dupire, CNAM, Paris, France
> Ian Hamilton, Independent accessibility specialist, UK
>
> Apologies in advance if you have received more than one copy of this
> e-mail.
>