True skate

Hi guys,

I am a developer at True Axis and would love to hear any changes you might like added to make True Skate more accessible.

From the above I gather that if we could support VoiceOver that would be a good start.
When it says above that the buttons aren't clearly labeled, is that an issue with the font, the size of the text or something else?

Thanks for any feed back you can offer.

James.

CLearly labeled buttons is more a thing that determines whether buttons are, well clearly labeled (that is, do the labels for any buttons make sense)? for example, say you have a button in your app and it's default label is "IconGameStart24". That doesn't really help a VoiceOver user determine what the button will do unless he or she activates it. Now, take the same button and label it "Start Game". Then, add a VoiceOver hint that says something like "Begins a New Game".

HTH<

Joseph

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the reply.

I guess I was looking for specific feedback about our buttons in True Skate. Our main menu has buttons labeled like "Missions", "Skateparks", "Skateboard", "Achievements", etc. all of which have text underneath them with longer descriptions so I felt that the actual text was fairly clear. Perhaps just adding VoiceOver support would be enough for us to make the game more usable?

I would like to make improvements if possible.

Cheers.

James.

Here's a link I foud on this site in the guides section that will help you make your apps accessible to voice over users.

http://www.applevis.com/guides/ios-ios-apps-ipad-iphone-ipod-touch-miscellaneous-programming-ios-voiceover/ios-app-voiceover

What did you use to write this game? I know nothing in regards to programming but I know that depending on the game engine, making it accessible to VoiceOver is impossible, Unity being chief among them. I think it would be really cool to have this game accessible, thank you for trying to figure out how to do this.

Hi everyone, thanks for all the replies.

The link above looks very useful, I've bookmarked it so I can read it through more carefully later.

We use our own custom engine for True Skate so hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult to get some accessibility features put in.

I have heard that Unity is difficult to work with from an accessibility point of view and last night I started thinking about making a plugin to make it easier and managed to find someone already working on one.
https://icodelikeagirl.com/2016/03/23/unity-plugin-for-ui-accessiblity/

I offered my help to Michelle if she needs it rather than getting serious about my own plugin, collaboration on these kinds of things is better than a hundred unfinished attempts :)

If anyone has spent some time playing True Skate, I would be very interested to know if there are any significant issues with the acutal game play that we could tweak? Better use of colour, sounds, that kind of thing?

I should also clarify that I'm here as myself, not representing the company, so I can't promise that anything will change. But I am enthusiastic about adding accessibility features myself and True Axis does seem open to me exploring these tweaks.

Hi. I'm a bit reluctant to pay for an app with so little accessibility added, at least not yet. The very best advice I can give you is to actually test the accessibility of your app with VoiceOver enabled. You can hit your home button 3 times to enable VoiceOver. While it's on, remember every one tap you do, we tap twice. When you're done, just hit your home button 3 more times and then VoiceOver will turn off. There are also a couple other custom voiceOver gestures, but those shouldn't impact things too much. Also, you would be surprised how many people are interested in helping as beta testers. Some folks like myself have beta tested some other apps and might be able to give you some insight, since VoiceOver isn't something you use every day, but we do. I do hope the link someone posted earlier is helpful.

I just enabled Voice Over and True Skate was unusable. Not only were our swipes being consumed by Voice Over making it impossible to interact with the game, I appear to be able to interact with invisible items like the status bar when trying to play the game. I was quite surprised how unusable it was to be honest.

Thanks for all the advice, I think I have a good amount of info to at least make the game playable now and I will definitely keep you all in mind if / when we need some testing done, which clearly is important, my Voice Over usage will be pretty poor compared to yours.

Cheers.

James.

Great I look forward to hopefully being able to play this some day! Something to note is that even if the menus are accessible it may not mean that the game is. Thanks for all your hard work!

I really appreciate the time your putting into investigating this. I would keep in mind, as previous posters have said, that just because the menues are accessible, the entire game works. How does the rider know when to turn, skid, or flip the board? is their a way someone completely blind could get that information? just a few things to consider. Again, thank you so much for looking. It looks like a fun game, and I, also, would love to beta test if you ever need people.

One cool thing about True Skate (in my opinion) is that the menus aren't really important anyway so I will probably focus on the game play first, with the obvious exception of allowing you to actually get to the gameplay.
True Skate is less of a game and more of a simulator, we have missions in there and achievements but they are more about learning to play than anything gamey.

Someone who is completely blind won't know when they should or shouldn't interact with the board at this point. I have started thinking about if it might be possible to change that using audio queues, one trick will be giving those queues in such a way that they are useful but not constant and annoying. Our skateparks are quite crowded with obstacles which might mean audio queues would be firing all the time, but I have some ideas that I think are pretty cool to solve that :)

I have also been thinking about ways we can use colour to really emphasise the components of the skateparks so that it might be easier to navigate for people who aren't completely blind. If you know of any games that do this well I would appreciate their names so I could see what colours they use and in what way.

James, Apple has a section on their Developer website in which they talk about making their games playable by people with a range of disabilities. You can find it by going to developer.apple.com/accessibility.

One way of indicating to blind users that there are obstacles would be to use stereo audio cues, i.e. if there is an obstacle on the left, a blind player would hear something on the left if they were using headphones. The best way to see how audiogames work for us would be to try some games that we can play, many of which can be found on this website. Another good community of blind gamers can be found at www.audiogames.net and forum.audiogames.net.

When we talk about button labelling, the labels are what the buttons would be called in Xcode, or whatever other application you used to develop the game. VoiceOver cannot interpret the actual text that would be seen on screen unless there is code that has this text.

With games such as these where there is a lot of action, it may be useful to integrate direct touch that is explained on this page. (http://www.applevis.com/guides/ios/tips-taking-full-advantage-voiceover-your-app). Someone above mentioned VoiceOver Hints; these are explained at the above Apple Developer website.

Michelle, who is investigating making Unity accessible to VoiceOver, asked us blind users for some feedback on her app in March. You can see our discussion with her here: (http://www.applevis.com/forum/app-development/game-developer-would-love-some-input).

I hope that your application becomes accessible to us in the near future.