Accessibility observations part 3

It's been longer than I intended between posts in this accessibility miniseries, but I had work troubles and I had holiday non-troubles.

Today: Menus.

Lots of IF projects make use of menu mechanisms. The player's choice from a menu might trigger a branch in gameplay or reconfigure some aspect of the game presentation. The whole menu system might be a self-contained ecosystem outside of the game world, a way to present browsable material like game instructions, hints or about-the-author information. An IF project may feature any or all the above mentioned modes, or more.

I had thought it would be easy to start to talk about designing menus which lean to screen reader-friendliness, but I've realised this is actually a complicated area. Different IF platforms handle text output and player input in different ways. Some projects can be played online, some offline and some both ways. Anecdotes from the recent discussion topic about accessibility over at intfiction.org suggest that screen reader compatibility with online CYOA games is variable.

By the way, notice how I included all of the words 'the recent discussion topic about accessibility over at intfiction.org' in the hyperlink, rather than just attaching it to, say, the 'intfiction.org' part. This approach is an accessibility help for web content in general, since screen reader users can hop amongst hyperlinks as landmarks. If they're scanning about to see what links are on a page, or looking for a particular link, just having a single word for the link might not make it clear where the link's going to or why it's there.

Now, I can also imagine that if you elongated all body text links of a link-heavy page in this fashion, the result might be visually painful for sighted users. This situation strikes me as an example of one in which it's good to be aware of the accessibility issues, but where individual writers and authors need to work out the best approach and balance for their own content in particular cases.

Back to the menus – so there's probably a lot of work to be done in the future by game and screen reader engine programmers in getting the two worlds to be able to talk each other more consistently. As is the case with many IF projects, work on this kind of thing to date seems to have been done mostly in isolation, where interested individuals program up solutions to existing problems. As an example, I point to the Win Glulx and Win Frotz compatibility addons for the open source screen reader NVDA (search for 'Win Glulx' and 'Win Frotz' on the target page). However, the scope of my posts is about what game authors can do today.

First it's worth remembering some of the principles of typical good menu design that will help any player:

• Don't make menu entries too long.
• Don't include too many entries in one menu.
• Don't use too many submenus within a menu. A bit of popular neuroscience in editor circles says that readers of a book will find more than five levels of heading too confusing, and that readers of a webpage will find more than three levels of heading too confusing. The latter is probably applicable to IF menu depth.
• When possible or relevant, use a consistent delivery style and author voice for the menu entry prose.

Screen reader programs can read one line of text at a time under the user's control. This means that as an author, you can expect that a player who is using a screen reader will be able to browse up and down through your menu options if they need to be reminded of the content of any of them.

On the other hand, a player using the built-in text-to-speech features of their computer's OS and/or of an interpreter itself probably won't have the same luxury. They may have to listen to a read-through of the whole menu, then go through further full reads if they need to hear any option more than once. Players in this situation are unlikely to enjoy encountering long menus or unnecessarily long menu options.

If the principal input device is the keyboard, as is the case for the majority of parser-driven games, assigning a unique keypress to each menu option (eg 1-9, then A-Z as needed) is a good way to go. I went with a system like this for my new Inform 7 Menus extension in 2014. So did Daniel Willis when he wrote a new menu extension for Kerkerkruip. We happened to write our extensions independently of one another but roughly at the same time, both with screen reader compatibility in mind. My extension broke in the major new version of Inform and I have only recently fixed it – see my blog post about Menus version 3.

If the principal input device is the mouse (ie the menu options are hyperlinks) a screen reader user should be able to activate the options the same way they can activate links they have selected on a webpage... if the game itself is being delivered by a webpage. The screen reader functionality for clickable links within a game delivered by an IF interpreter is probably unknown turf for now.

EDIT - OK, it's not so unknown. In response to my comment here, Daniel says in a comment on this post: "Just one comment, which is that the feedback we got from some of the guys at audiogames.net was that not only do links work in screen readers, but they prefer them. So Kerkekruip's menu uses hyperlinks when the game is in screen reader mode."

A menu presentation which is pretty anti-accessible is one that involves a moveable cursor as the selection instrument. There are all kinds of problems for the user, including keeping track of the location of whatever ASCII element has been chosen to represent the cursor, and the tediousness of having to move that symbol around with keypresses while potentially listening to re-reads of the menu choices. In an all-text environment, the method for updating the display with the cursor's new position might also involve reprinting the whole menu in the game window; again, this is unhelpful for screen readers.

The old standby menu extension for Inform 7, Emily Short's Menus, exhibited most of these problems, which is why both Daniel Willis and I happened to have similar ideas about updating it at the same time. I'm not ragging on Emily's Menus per se – obviously it's been a terrific thing (and generally the only thing!) allowing users to add menus to their Inform games for years and years.

In the next episode: The topic of non-alphanumeric characters, at least.