Re: Survey for WCAG and Game Accessibility Guidelines Gap Analysis

Thanks Brian,

It would be great to chat with you, I’ll contact you off-list.

Regarding "you are allowed to frustrate and miscommunicate to the user because it's a test”
– I agree with you; just adding that a well designed game tries to avoid frustration with game balancing, keeping the gamer in a state of flow (between frustration and boredom). 

Best,
Thomas
__________________________________________
Thomas Westin, PhD
IT Pedagogue
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences
Stockholm University
Postbox 7003, 164 07 Kista, Sweden
Visiting address: Borgarfjordsgatan 12
dsv.su.se

> On 9Mar 2018, at 13:08, Brian Bors <b.bors@accessibility.nl> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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.
>