Hello,
I am an iOS developer who creates small indie games in his freetime. I never worked with accessibility tools before and would like to improve on that. Therefore, as a first step, I would like to make one of my games playable with VoiceOver. During the WWDC last week, I visited Apple’s accessibility lab, where visually impaired Apple employees already gave me some feedback and tips which was super helpful and interesting for me. I additionally watched some more WWDC videos about accessibility, read through some tutorials and started to adapt my game to make it more accessible. This is the point where I would like to ask for your help - since I do not know anyone who is visually impaired, every kind of feedback from you would be super helpful and highly appreciated. I already tried to use the game with the screen curtain on, but that is still not the same since I already know how the game looks like. The game is basically a card matching game for kids - I don’t want to give you much more context about it for now, since the feedback would be most valuable as if you would just download the game via the App Store and try it for the first time.
So here is the Testflight/Beta build with the accessibility improvements:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/9bpTfsOR
And if you still want to have more context for the game, here is also the App Store link where the description describes the game more in detail:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1597674393
I know that I still have some tasks open, like making all Ploppies visually distinguishable - and not only different by color, but during the implementation, I still came up with some more questions:
- Is a different contrast of different Ploppy parts enough for differentiation?
- Are different eyes/mouth for Ploppies enough differentiation?
- Should Levels have an accessibility label like “Level 1” or just “1”? Should I also add the theme? Like “Level 10 Winter Island”
- What should the accessibility label for the cards be like? Currently I am using Card 1, Card 2, Card 3 etc.
- Is a Google Translation better than no translation or should I rather stick to english then? I unfortunately did not find a way to force english as language for all elements yet
In theory it should work for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV - but try it for iPhone/iPad first please.
Thank you very much in advance for your help!
Best Regards,
Michael
Comments
would like to test it
well, will give it a try.
Thank you @ming
Already looking forward on your feedback!
Will test it as well
I'll beta test it and send you my feedback.
Great work so far
I've sent some feedback already from my testing, but I just want to say it here,
Great job so far, keep it up, and thank you for reaching out and letting us help with beta testing this app.
I feel like card 1, card 2, etc is a good way to go as far as going because again, the user will have to remember which goes with which card. As far as levels, ,I'd say things like, level 1 would be better, and the tittle of the level is really optional in my opinion. As long as voiceover reads out the level you are in, I don't see anything bad with having or not having the title of the level. Also, I forgot to include this in my feedback, but there should be two toggles, one for sound and another for music, that or having a way to decreased the music volume and let the sound be louder or softer than the music depending on preference.
First impressions
First off, great you want to learn about accessibility! The sound and zoom tagals are reversed with VoiceOver. VoiceOver says, sound on when no sound is playing. There should be a description of a floppy before someone starts playing. I’ve sent you Feedback on TestFlight detailing other thing I think are worth changing
What would you prefer for getting Feedback?
Hello,
What would you prefer for getting Feedback, TestFlight, or AppleVis? I can do both, but just want to know so I’m not dooplicating feedback.
Feedback
First of all thank you very much for testing it and for the nice feedback, great to hear that you like it!
About the toggles: I actually thought VoiceOver should say what the button does and not the current state of the button - therefore, I had it exactly the other way around - but good to know! I already changed that and uploaded a new version.
@Igna about the additional sound control, I was already thinking about such controls, but the UI is already quite stuffed/limited. I have to think about how I could make it work - either I make some elements smaller to have more space for additional buttons or I make 3 States for the Button:
- Music on and Sound on
- Music off and Sound on
- Music off and Sound off
@Daniel I read it on both platforms anyway. In general, it would maybe make sense to post it here, so everyone sees it so there are less duplications and maybe even feedback gets discussed with each other, so we hear more opinions about the feedback. But if you prefer to keep it private, feel free to also just give me feedback via TestFlight!
Great!
I will post both here and TestFlight. I will download the new version now. Your revised toggle state sounds good from a VoiceOver perspective. I’ll test it to verify!